


my darling dear

by Winterstar



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Dubious Consent, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt Steve Rogers, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Medical Procedures, Mental Instability, Monsters, Nightmares, Post-Avengers (2012), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Horror, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-16 17:48:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 44,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14815967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterstar/pseuds/Winterstar
Summary: Through the snow, the ice, and to the very ends of the Earth, Tony vows to bring Steve home. The nightmares Steve suffered drove him to accepting a dangerous mission from SHIELD that very nearly kills him until Tony finally fulfills his promise to save him. Yet, the nightmare continues when Tony realizes Steve still isn't safe. There are forces after Steve, wanting more than he could possibly ever give. Tony has one option to keep Steve safe, to escape the nightmare and the horror they both experienced. But can he save Steve before it is too late for both of them?





	my darling dear

**Author's Note:**

> I want to send all the thanks and appreciate to my artist Narukyuu. The piece that she did was such an inspiration I wrote three different stories until I finally settled on this one! I really had a problem with so many ideas swirling around in my head. I ended up rewriting the story three times but I really think this is the best of the three. I wanted it to be different than what I'd written before and this is it! I hope you like it. Love the [Art](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14818685). Art can also be found within the story.
> 
> I also want to thank thegraytigress for her beta. She truly did a fast job when I was whining about not being able to get everything done on time. 
> 
> A note about the story - this takes place a few months after the Battle of New York.

“Tony, it might be time to go back.”

He stood on the precipice of the frozen cliff, the Arctic Ocean roiling and rumbling at the edge of the long distant shore below them. Glancing over his shoulder at Clint, Rhodey, and Natasha, he shook his head. He couldn’t abandon the last of his hope. If he did what else would be left for him, all these months they’d built something to have it fragment. No, he wouldn’t allow fear to stop him. Natasha was on the one who had spoken. Of the three of them, Natasha always told Tony the brutal truth. Was it an unkind thing or a mercy? He didn’t care, nor did he want to figure it out. They’d sent her to approach him at the edge of forever and bring him back. 

She reached out and touched the armor. It had to be cold to the touch and she wasn’t wearing gloves again. Again. She always took them off. During their expedition, he repeatedly reminded her to put them back on – this was the frozen world, the world that time had forgotten. This was the world of Steve’s nightmares. Tony knew those night terrors intimately. How many times had he startled awake to Steve thrashing in the bed next to him, begging and shivering at the same time. The chilling memories haunted Steve, but at the same time he suffered great fears about the shadows of the deep. He would sit on their bed with his arms around his bent legs, rocking slightly. One night only weeks into their nascent relationship, he wiped away the quiet tears and murmured to Tony.

“It’s not the cold. It’s never the cold there.”

Tony had stayed silent, allowing the darkness between them to create the space Steve needed to speak, to reveal, to expose the truths hidden deep in his heart. 

“The cold – God –I would have done anything to have the cold take me.” Steve glanced up to the ceiling as if he could see it in the night, but Tony knew he fought to stop the flow of his tears. 

He reached across the small space between them, put his hand on shaking shoulders and said, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but I’m here. You know I’m here.”

Steve had nodded and whispered, “It’s always there. Always waiting.”

Tony had thought he meant the war, the shades of death and carnage followed Steve as his own personal albatross. The next day Steve always appeared to be completely normal like any other day. The nightmares were a hangover from distant times. Tony had his share of nightmares, so he chalked it up to that, and didn’t badger new boyfriend about it. He knew that he hated when people psycho-analyzed his dreams about the abyss, about Afghanistan, about a hundred little despondencies of his life. He shrugged their pawing questions off. So he left Steve’s dreams alone. 

Now? Now he wished he’d listened. He may well have lost Steve because of his decision to give the man space. Here in the frozen tundra with the ice and snow reflecting the pitiless crystalline blue sky, isolation echoed back. Steve was out there, somewhere, and Tony vowed to find him, to bring him home.

“Come on Tony, at least come back to camp,” Natasha said and when he turned to meet her gaze. 

“No. He’s close, I can feel it,” Tony said and shivered. His suit malfunctioned long ago, so the heated plating went through a cycle of too hot and then too cold. He’d sweat and want to peel off the armor, but then it would turn off and his perspiration would feel like congealed gel on his skin as he froze from its effects. 

“It’s almost night,” Natasha replied. “Come on and get some coffee.”

He shook his head. He wanted to laugh until he cried. The twilight that covered him burdened his shoulders like a heavy mantle. He listened to the crash of the sea against the ancient snowy cliff. “You go. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Tony, please.” Natasha sniffled and it sounded like it might be from crying and not the cold. He never knew Natasha to cry. They had all taken a hit when Steve disappeared on a mission so many weeks ago. He will never forgive himself for watching Steve walk out the door and not moving to stop him. Natasha had told him to stop blaming himself – none of them knew what had happened. None of them could have predicted any of what would happen. They had all thought that Steve had been rescued from the ice as simply as that – but simplicity laid waste to the truth. 

Natasha tried a smile, but it weakened under the look on her face. It crumpled. “We can eat something. Decide on a new plan of action.”

He smirked and bowed his head. Turning he looked at her. “There’s no other plan of action. Whatever happened, however he ended up piloting that plane back here, we can’t stop now. I should have known better. I should have followed him.” Tony swallowed down the bitter pill of truth. He allowed this to happen. He watched Steve walk out of their shared penthouse apartment and smiled as he went. Smiled and cursed. He’d shot words that raked his brain and poisoned his heart as he recalled them. They’d fought because Tony pushed the issue of coming out to the world about their relationship. Steve refused and it hurt Tony, struck him like a slap across the face. In retrospect, Tony should have known better, and he did. Accepting the idea that same sex relationships were part of their cultural definition had been something Steve struggled with and confessed as much to Tony. Yet, he decided it would be best to tear off the bandage all at once. He scheduled a press conference, Steve had accepted a mission – they hadn’t even kissed goodbye.

“Tony, please,” Natasha said one more time. 

He relented. “We go tomorrow. Early.” He would not stop his quest. Even though the cold seemed to eat away at his brain, make everything around him numb and distant. He followed her back.

For her part, she kept her grumbling to herself and led him back across the plains of snow and ice to small embankment that gave the tents some protection from the frigid winds of the Arctic. The crisp snow crunched under their booted feet and Natasha stuffed her hands in her pockets. He wanted to lash out at her, but Natasha wasn’t the kind of person he could take his anger out on and not suffer the consequences. As he ducked into the tent he caught a glimpse of Rhodey and realized how very much alone he was in his quest. Rhodey lectured him to allow experts to look for Steve, not call on some half-baked initiative that barely had gotten off the ground (forget that the Avengers had just recently saved the world during the Battle of New York just a few months before Steve had vanished). 

Without a greeting, Tony said, “I’m going tomorrow. If you don’t want to then you are welcome to leave.” His grim expression silenced their protests.

Rhodey glanced at Natasha and then at Clint who sat to the side of the space. There wasn’t much room in the tent. None of them could stand up straight at the sides, only in dead center. The heater occupied that space of the tent. The sheeting of the floor kept the melting ice below the heater from seeping inside, but they still kept it on low. Tony went to his side of the tent where his sleeping bag was laid out and he probably had Rhodey to thank for that. For all that Rhodey disapproved the mission, he still acted on Tony’s behalf. He should be happy to have such a friend by his side. Rhodey handed Clint and Natasha tin mugs of steaming coffee and he lifted the dented coffee pot to ask Tony if he wanted a cup. Tony nodded and then retracted the armor. Underneath the warmth of the heated metal, he wore an insulated under suit with gloves and a cowl around his head. None of them had bathed in the last week. The tent was rank, but who cared at this point.

Drinking down the hot brew, Tony finished it without a word and slammed the mug down on the top of the heater. “I’m going to sleep.” He went to his sleeping bag and dropped onto it, not taking off the armor. He planned to sit up and sleep. Forget about eating. He wanted to get this over with, to find the remains of the plane and start the grieving process. Weeks had gone by and he replayed the moments he last saw Steve over and over again. It hadn’t been pretty. Tony closed his eyes as he thought of it, ashamed even now when he remembered the words he’d spoken. It should have been a fond farewell, not one of anger and resentment. Tony had always heard that the moment a relationship became tainted with resentment it was doomed. Did he ascribe to such theories? Tony forced himself to think of the present and not some crazy, nutso theories about love and relationships. He was losing it. He understood that. His friends thought he was nuts. He turned his back to his team. It wasn’t easy with the armor on, even the newest version that allowed sleeker movements.

He couldn’t get that haunted look of Steve’s out of his mind. The night before Steve had left on his ill-fated mission, Tony had turned to Steve and asked, “Tell me you’re mine.” It had been a joyful moment. He had Steve in his arms, warm and hot from their lovemaking. “All mine.”

The color drained from Steve’s face, leaving him ashen and gray. “No one can have me, not all of me.”

“What?” Tony had been confused by the off way Steve spoke as if in a trance. 

“Don’t ask me, Tony,” Steve said and shivered. “I can’t promise you anything. I can’t.”

Tony lashed out then, the litter of words, cruel and cutting, that spat out of his mouth covered their last hours in trash and foul mouthed excrement. Steve seemed smaller then, tiny and weak. How could Captain America look so frail? That haunted look glazed over Steve’s eyes as if his reality saw some other thing, as if he inhabited a world of suffering. It’d only served to enrage Tony. The idea that Tony wasn’t enough to make Steve happy, to wipe away the anguish that followed him every day – it hurt. 

“Tony?” Rhodey said, bringing Tony back to the present. 

“Forget it, Rhodey. I go in the morning. You don’t have to follow me.” His friends shouldn’t have to deal with Tony’s madness, with his guilt, with his sins.

“Where?” Rhodey asked. “Where are you going?”

Tony turned around and looked at his friend. “I’m going to find him. He’s here.” He gulped down the words, the words he really wanted to say – that the vision troubled his sleep. Those moments in the hours where day and night flirted and teased one another – when Tony would wake up to see the stark terror in Steve’s eyes as he sat on the bed, curled up and shivering. It felt almost as if the terrors crept across the bed like a million bugs and crawled up onto Tony to infect him as well.

“I’m going in the morning. Over beyond the ridge, I’m going that way,” Tony answered. 

“They said it wasn’t safe down beyond the ridge, Tony. At least listen to the townspeople.” Rhodey never sounded frightened, but he heeded warnings when given them. 

Last night, they stopped at the last town before the frozen wastes of the Arctic ate them. The townspeople, long the inhabitants of the island, told them not to go further than the ridge. When Tony pressed them they explained the evil resided there and Natasha only frowned at the legend. Some part of Tony squirmed at the description of the evil that lived beyond the Ice Barrens as the natives called it. He’d almost agreed with the team to leave the area and move onto their next target, but then he happened to listen to the story offered to him by an older lady. They’d been ready to retire to their rented rooms when the lady with her large potbelly and silvery knotted hair and casually mentioned the explosion in the sky. 

“Explosion?” At first, Tony thought she might be talking Steve’s plane and the crash that must have happened just weeks ago. 

“Yah, yah,” she said and smiled with snuggled teeth. “Thought you might be one of the seekers. On a quest. Used to get a lot of those right after the war.”

“Quest?” Tony asked while both Natasha and Rhodey rolled their eyes at him.

“Yah, lots would come, none would go.” She nodded. She sat in the corner of the inn, her work-worn hands on her ample belly. The room smelled of fish and sweat and sea water. 

“What were they looking for?” The lights around them flickered and dimmed as the wind outside played its game with modern technology. 

“The explosion. Happened so many years ago. The world lit up and the sun didn’t go down that day. It should have been dark, ‘cause it was the time of year when night falls down and the day doesn’t wake up again.” She smiled at him, her grin welcoming but with very little teeth. “You go there, you die. Like all the rest.” The age in her eyes spoke of wisdom, but also something else – it reminded Tony of his childhood fairy tales, where a witch would tell the hero something foreboding and dangerous. Yet the hero would always strike out, always go to find the hidden treasure or fight away the demons hiding the sleeping princess. 

“This explosion… when did it happen?” Part of him hoped that it wouldn’t be Steve’s plane, because that would mean there was a chance Steve survived.

She struggled and sniffled. “‘Bout time I was three or four. Maybe around the time of the end of the big war, you know the one.”

“The Great War?” The fact dashed his hopes. 

“Not so great, and no, the second one,” she said and cackled out a cough and laugh at the same time. “Now you go and get Tilda a nice brew of warm beer before you leave on your foolhardy mission. Right now? Go get it.”

He had bought her a beer, a whole pitcher of beer in fact. He hated warm beer, but the natives seemed to like it that way. He couldn’t blame them, everything else was cold in this god forsaken land. Rhodey and Clint had dismissed the woman’s story, but it ate at Tony because of the location. They tread over the same geography that once held an ice encased Captain America. If Tony’s suspicions bore out, then it meant that Steve’s mission brought him back to the site of his original crash. Why hadn’t SHIELD told them? But then again, Fury had informed them that the mission wasn’t the run of the mill SHIELD operation. The explosion the woman spoke of must have been Steve’s plane back in the 40s at the end of the war. It had to be the plane. It had to be the Valkyrie. 

With that new information in hand, Tony led them out toward the Ice Barrens. They’d trekked across the frozen black and white lands for over two days. No villages, no outposts, no one to even give them direction. But he followed Tilda’s words, how it looked over the horizon, what she had said about the great ball of light in the sky. He trudged forward, not listening to Rhodey or Natasha as they followed him. Now was the time to ask them to go, to leave.

“You don’t have to come. You can go. I’ll meet you back at the last village,” he said.

“This obsession isn’t healthy,” Natasha said as she settled on her pile of blankets and sleeping bag. “Why would you even think Steve would come back here? The plane was lost. We don’t even have data on the transponder. It went dead. We need to be reasonable.”

“It didn’t go dead,” Tony bit at the air as he spoke. “He turned it off. He didn’t want to be found. Fury told me – he told me.” He stopped because airing certain truths made them more powerful, created a potency in them that could not be dispersed. 

Natasha narrowed her eyes at Tony but it was Clint who asked, “Fury told you what?”

“It wasn’t a standard mission. It was an operation commissioned by the World Security Council. Steve agreed. They sacrificed Steve for a reason.” Tony swallowed down the stomach acid bubbling at the back of his throat. “There’s something wrong and Steve knew it.” He wanted to cry but somehow, he’d lost the ability. The cold, the fear, the numbness stole it from him. “You never saw. You never saw him when he would have those nightmares-.”

“We all have nightmares,” Clint said and Tony wanted to agree. Shit, Clint’s nightmares since Loki decided to dance around in his head probably plagued him just as much as the rest of them. But Steve’s nightmares – they were different.

“He’s Captain America. You see him on missions on a daily basis. You see how confident, how strong he is.” Tony covered his face with his hands. He didn’t want anyone to see. “No, what I saw, what I witnessed, wasn’t normal.”

“Why didn’t you tell someone? Try and get him some help?” Rhodey said. Tony should take offense, but logic and reason was what attracted Tony to Rhodey. He needed that type of balance in his life.

“I did. At least, I tried to get him to ask for help,” Tony said. “But he shook it off. Every morning, every time he was fine.” The fear bubbled up and through him. “So I would just drop it. It was just dreams, right?” Or not. Tony didn’t know.

“What was different this time?” Natasha asked. After all these days, searching and picking at dried-up leads, they came to it. The final straw, the real reason.

“The last few times, the last few nightmares,” Tony said and swallowed hard because he saw it in front of him like he sat in the bed again, terrified at Steve’s actions. “I woke up to find him…” He gagged and squeezed his eyes closed, but that just made it worse. Seeing Steve clawing at his own skin, tearing away flesh from muscle, crying out but not stopping – it horrified Tony. “He hurt himself trying to stop the nightmares.” It was all he could say. Describing the blood smears all over the bed, the sheets, all over Steve’s usually perfect flesh eluded Tony. “I asked him why, but even he didn’t know. He couldn’t answer.” He recalled trying to stop Steve, grabbing at his arms, capturing them only to be hit away as Steve sobbed. The words Steve cried out blazed a brand in Tony’s head.

_She has me. She has me. She’s eating me alive. Can’t you see? Can’t you see!_

When he looked at his companions again, the whole spectrum of emotions crossed their expressions from disbelief to horror. He wasn’t going to fight or debate. “I’m going tomorrow. You don’t have to go with me.”

Rhodey listened to him and only pain and sympathy stared back at Tony. For his fool mission, he risked losing his closest, oldest friend. 

“You don’t have to come,” Tony murmured again and closed his eyes to try to forget the pity filled look in Rhodey’s eyes. 

Sleep eluded him as the nightmare images of Steve waking up, screaming, ripping at his own skin filled his thoughts. Before the break of dawn, Tony got himself up. He broke the crust of ice across his face and glanced around the small tent. Natasha slept buried deep in her bag. Rhodey curled close to the door as if guarding it. Clint happened to be awake as Tony kicked away the last of the sleeping bag. He respected that Clint never argued with him about the mission as he climbed up and prepared to leave.

It was time to go. This was his mission and he would accept the consequences one way or the other. He had explained to them his need to do this, his guilt that he never pushed Steve to find help, to get help. How could he tell his friends, his teammates, that some unfathomable tendril existed between how he felt in his bones that Steve Rogers was a part of his story? Part of him, and that without Steve, Tony faltered, became _less_ somehow. Explaining any of that to them would only lead to more distant looks, sorrowful expressions. No, he wouldn’t stand for it, their unspoken conclusions that he’d gone off the deep end along with Steve. As for that, he refused to give up on Steve, surrender the idea that something sinister and unknown might be lurking and he’d missed it. They’d all missed it. How the fuck did anyone at SHIELD or even with the Avengers think that a man could be frozen in ice for nearly seventy years and not be affected, not have lasting damage that would drive him to insanity? Yet, at the same time that same man, Steve Rogers, embodied a living legend, a hero, and a kind and generous person. No, Tony would not surrender his hopes and dreams for and with Steve. If Tony did that, then he might as well admit defeat. 

JARVIS spoke to him. “The wind chill factor is minus 54 degrees below freezing, sir. I am initiating external plate heating.”

“Reserve power. Do the external plate heating but keep the internal temperature just above freezing.” 

“Sir?”

“I’ll be fine.” 

Clint stopped him before he exited the tent. His wind burned face showed little but his eyes revealed everything. The cold of Loki’s damage stayed. “Get him. Bring him home. But remember, he might not be who you thought he was.”

“Steve Rogers made Captain America, not the other way around. I’m going to find him and I’m going to save him.” He went to unzip the tent. Clint reached out and grabbed his arm.

“Don’t lose yourself.” Those words left a draft in his heart. 

With a short nod, he unzipped the tent. “Don’t wait for me. Go back to the village. I’ll be there by nightfall or I’ll be dead.” He exited the tent and didn’t turn around to see if Clint followed him or closed up the tent after him. He marched his way across the barren landscape that led down along what he assumed might actually be an iceberg butted up against the side of the island. The temperature in the suit went decidedly cooler but he suspected that JARVIS adjusted it so that it would more than a little above 32 degrees Fahrenheit. 

With the faceplate down on the helmet, he easily made out the landscape before him. He asked JARVIS to go through a scan. “I want to know if there’s refined metal, an alloy. Any vibranium.”

“Yes, sir. I will scan for it.” 

Tony listened to the crunch of the hardened snow and ice under his metal boots and stared across the gray lands as if looking for that one drop of color. The only color would be his armor, like a streak of blood across the white snow and the dull gray and black rocks. The lack of color drained his hope but he mustered his faith. Tony never ascribed to religion or God, but he remembered his childhood and his love of Captain America. The courage and bravery got him through a shit ton of hardships in his early years. Why not now as an adult? Sometimes adults needed inspiration as well

As he trudged forward, he listened to the steady intake and exhalation of his breathing. His breath encompassed the world, even the slow tramp of his steps seemed distant. What did he hope to find? A corpse? A madman? The fear that Steve had actually lost his mind, that the ice that once encompassed him had finally and completely taken him. Even so, after so many weeks, what did Tony hope to find? In the wasteland of this ice island, the answer chilled him. A corpse. If Steve flew the plane out to this place, this isolated area where the Valkyrie once went down all those decades ago, then he crashed it intentionally, looking for a certain peace that he could not find in the 21st century. A peace that Tony somehow failed to give him. That fact hurt Tony all the more, to know the ice and its imprisonment of Steve had driven him to this, to madness, to pain, to a mental isolation for which he could not find solace in Tony’s arms. And so, the guilt and the burden drove Tony forward to search and find – whatever was left. 

He stifled a cry. All these days with his team members he kept the mourning, the reality, under cover. They all knew it. Steve Rogers was dead. They were searching for a body. Tony refused to accept that reality until he had to, until he found what remained of Steve. Even now the numbness of feeling kept him distant to the pain.

The land sloped downward, a crack against the flow of the ground that nearly tripped him. Streaks of black burnt the snow away to the harsh rocky lands beneath the blanket of ice. Tony decided it might be better to jet off into the sky to scan the cliff face instead of tumbling down it. Launching, he surveyed the icy island. In the distance far to the right he glimpsed the heat signatures of the village. Farther still the HUD reported the early morning activity at the harbor. Not much, not yet, but it was there. Tony hovered in the air above the island, and then told JARVIS to examine the rock formations of the cliff side. Intuition, something, told him that the strange crack in the surface of the island seemed wrong to him. Unnatural. All the other crags and cracks went longitudinally while this one went latitudinal. 

“JARVIS, scan the crack that I almost tripped in.”

The data streamed over the HUD and Tony watched it. Part of him dreaded the idea of finding nothing. Part of him feared actually finding something because it meant he discovered Steve’s probable grave. A blinking across the HUD alerted him to an anomaly. He zipped toward the crevice. Like a dagger through the heart of the island, the ragged rip in the Earth cut into the ground. “What am I seeing?”

“Sir, there are some signs of a plane, a bent fuselage and the tail end, and there are life signs. I am not certain if they are human.”

“Life signs?” He heart skittered in his chest and he tried to take a cleansing breath but the ability to do that had been negated years ago in Afghanistan. “What else do you got?”

“I am scanning for vibranium, but there is interference.”

“Interference? Electrical? Magnetic?” Tony zoomed over the crack and then toward the crevice. It opened up like a maw hungry for life or any hapless animal that might journey this way. Tony imagined whole polar bears being consumed by it.

“Electro-magnetic, sir.”

Tony waited, hovering in the air, as he considered if he should alert his team members. No. Waiting for them to get here would take another hour. If there was life, if Steve was alive in that crevice, then Tony had one choice only. He flew closer and then asked, “Can you read anything?”

“A strange luminescence, sir. The electro-magnetic forces read quite strongly toward the back of the cave.”

“Would they interfere with the suit?” 

“Not that I can tell,” JARVIS reported. 

“There’s a cave?” Tony asked. JARVIS outlined the opening to the cave on the HUD map. The opening was narrow and Tony directed JARVIS to measure it. A little over meter and a half wide. At its widest it closed in on two meters. He should be able to fit through it but the question remained: how deep was it and where did it lead? “JARVIS do you have any more information on the formations, geology, you know, that kind of science.” Stuff that Tony ignored in school and continued to ignore as an adult.

JARVIS scrolled the information across the HUD and it looked like the cave would easily fit him but his AI could not clearly conclude what lay in the deep cold of the cavern. “Only one way to find out. You said there were life signs and signs of the plane?”

“Yes.”

“Promising,” Tony said but didn’t qualify that with what it promised. He aimed for the fissure and shot through it, not taking it slowly or carefully as his AI warned him. He went through the curves and then dropped down to the cave floor. Strange streaks of bioluminescence lit the way and Tony looked up at the tall sides of the cleft. He imagined that the organisms radiating the soft blue glow must be hardy against the cold, but he couldn’t fathom how they came to be. He’d never heard of such an organism. Not this cold, not this beautiful. The vines of growth went up a hundred feet or more along the walls of the gap. Tony thought about collecting samples. Bruce would like to have one. But he had to stay focused. His heart thrummed in his chest. Finding Steve, helping Steve. Finally.

As he moved through the opening of the cave he spotted what was left of the plane. Where the rest of it may lay he had no idea. The tail end of the Quin Jet and a part of the fuselage embedded in the ice as if someone had tried to punch a hole in the ice with the jet. He touched the twisted metal, thinking about Steve. 

As he studied what was left of the plane, he spotted the scorch marks around the bent metal. The rest of the plane might have burned away. A hot enough fire- but then the strange plants lining the walls – how could they have survived? No. There couldn’t have been a conflagration that hot to completely destroy what was left. Tony turned to the back of the cave. There were life signs.

The horrified words of Steve came to mind again as Tony, _She has me. She has me. She’s eating me alive. Can’t you see? Can’t you see!_

What kind of memories of a world war brought on the idea that someone – or something – had been devouring, eating him alive? What did Steve mean? Had it been metaphorical? Had Steve had the presence of mind to be symbolic during his night terrors or was he being literal? 

A chill crept up Tony’s spine as he rounded the corner of the cave and the blue crystal of ice glimmered. He needed to keep his head in the game, not go off on frightening tangents. It had been a nightmare, nothing more. Not memories. Nothing had tried to eat Steve. 

“JARVIS, scan for life signs.” 

“Deeper in the cave, sir.” JARVIS pauses before he adds, “Sir, I am getting a strong signal for vibranium.”

Tony probed the walls with the buttercup shaped blooms, shining in the dark of night. “JARVIS, identify?” He’d never seen such beautiful luminous foliage, though Tony wasn’t that familiar with flora and especially not ones associated with extreme Northern climates. Botany was not something he ever wanted to become an expert on.

“Sir, I cannot. These do not seem to be in any scannable database.” 

“Have you checked the secure databases?” Tony asked. 

“Checked, sir. These are not a known species on Earth.”

“On Earth? How about not of Earth?” The buds seems to shiver as he examined them and each vine quaked and followed his movements as they shined light through the passageway. He needed Thor to offer some more of the Asgardian knowledge. As Earth became part of the interstellar community, more information on the unknown was particularly important. Where did these vines come from? 

It felt like the vines watched him through each tiny bud. He stepped away as the unnerving sensation of being observed washed over him. Turning, Tony released the faceplate and helmet until it retracted into the armor. He stared into the darkness behind him. Nothing answered his search but the winds out beyond the cave entrance. He chided himself. Ridiculous to think something or someone was watching. More ridiculous to think the terrified ramblings of a man in the midst of night terrors held any truths. 

Moving past the wall of trembling buds, Tony continued down the rocky pathway. He reached out and used the wall as a guide until he stumbled down the steep incline toward an open cave. The ceiling of the cave must have swept up beyond 5 meters. The width of the cave could have been more but the shadows toward the back hid its true scope. Waiting for his eyes to adjust, Tony listened as JARVIS spoke through his backup ear piece.

“Readings of life forms, sir. I can identify faint human like life forms, but-.” He stopped. 

Something shifted inside of Tony as the hairs on the back of his neck rose and he found himself panting in the dark. “What?” Tony prompted. The idea that his AI hesitated to speak scared the hell out of him. “What?”

“Sir, the lifeform – the reading is off the charts. It is large, it is massive. Sir, I suggest you leave. Now!”

Tony heard the words, acknowledged the warning with a distant part of his brain, but his eyes, all of his conscious thoughts, focused on the glint before him. Pristine and untouched as if it hadn’t been used for defense at all. It sat in the middle of the cave like it had only been deposited there just moments before, as if the owner had simply discarded it for a moment. It beckoned him.

The shield.

Captain America’s shield. 

Steve’s shield. He would never leave it. Sure, Tony witnessed Steve casually dumping any other weapon, a gun, a rifle – he left them all with the other Avengers, but the shield, the shield meant something. It might as well be part of his definition.

A chill ran up his spine. As he shivered against the thrill of discovery, Tony wondered if sensation originated from the find or something more dreadful. What had JARVIS just warned about? A large lifeform?

The shield beckoned him and JARVIS’ continued warnings faded into the background. He walked over to the shield, laid out on the cold ground as if a bait in a trap. Who would offer such a sweet and desirable lure? He glanced around again and swore he felt the whispers of the wind from outside the cave, but that wasn’t possible. 

“JARVIS, scan for anyone approaching the cave.” Maybe Clint decided to follow his trail and hovered outside, debating if Tony had finally lost his mind. Maybe they didn’t need to waste time on the debate. Maybe that was already a given. He shook away the doubts, the fears, and turned back to the shield. “JARVIS?”

“I detect no one, but I urge you, sir, to leave. The life signs I am detecting are emanating from this cave. I cannot fix my sensors on them. There seems to be some electromagnetic noise that is blocking my ability to pin down the source of the life signs and the electromagnetic energy signature.” 

Usually information like that served as a caution for Tony to back off and call for help but not today. The shield was at his feet. He could touch it if he just leaned down to pick it up. “JARVIS scan to see if the shield in front of me fits the dimensions of the real shield.”

“It does, sir. It is made out of vibranium.”

The temptation drew him and he succumbed to it. Tony knelt down and reached out as if it might be a hologram and his hand would go through it. But it was not a hologram or any illusion, but a solid piece of metal, a beautiful sculpted disc. Some might call it a Frisbee on steroids, but the craftsmanship and the resulting physics puzzled scientists all over the world. The tension gripping his chest, stumbling the beat of his heart eased. Steve. He must be here somewhere. Somewhere in this cave. All the evidence pointed to it. The burn marks on the ground, the remnants of Quin Jet, and now the shield – all pieces that spoke of Steve. With the shield, Tony knew that Steve had to be around, had to be close by. He would never leave his shield. Tony glanced back toward the passageway where the plane was jetting out of the cave wall. Perhaps the shield had been knocked free and the Quin Jet’s single occupant had been thrust into the wall of the cave when the crash happened. 

No. Tony couldn’t, wouldn’t believe it. Steve was not dead inside the broken wreckage, forever pinned inside the contorted pieces of the jet. No.

Gripping the shield, Tony picked it up. His heart’s rapidity mimicked a hummingbird’s pulse, so fast Tony could barely catch his breath. He stood up with his prize and scanned the area. Close. He stepped toward the darkness and he heard the shiver of the vines in the cavern’s entrance far behind him. Almost a whimper whispered from behind him. He twisted around, trying to see what was there.

Righting himself, Tony faced the darkness. He swore he saw it shift and undulate. He clutched the shield to him as if he needed more protection than what the armor gave him. An unseen breeze hit him, the cold needling his face. He almost asked JARVIS to close up the helmet but then the first curve of a tentacle waved past him. He staggered backward. It couldn’t be a tentacle. It made no sense. 

“Sir?”

Tony stayed stock still as if the ice around him crawled up his body and froze him in place. He couldn’t blink, couldn’t think, couldn’t respond to JARVIS’ insistent queries. 

“Please sir. I will take over the functions of the suit if you do not respond!”

He stuttered out. “N-n-no.”

The thing before him grew in size as it emerged from the depths. It transformed the darkness into a many tentacled creature that looked like a cross between an octopus and some fantastical creature that only Tolkien might have thought up back in the day. Tentacles thicker than his thigh in width reached for him and he staggered backward, the shield falling to the icy floor of the cave. Emerging from the corner of the cave, the beak and head appeared. A single eye blinked at Tony. The head alone was as big as Tony. The beak opened and closed and then the black eye turned red. 

Just as Tony decided to yell for JARVIS to get him out, the creature froze and its words sang in his head. _‘And what is this? Come to take my feast away, my darling dear?’_ He shivered against the melodious sounds. Maybe this was what a siren call was. 

“Sir, I am going to engage-.”

“Stop. Do nothing,” Tony gasped out. A wave, like the rush of a locomotive, roared in his head as he looked upon the creatures with its horny bill and its gargantuan eye. The lid slipped over the eyeball and the iridescent glow followed his motion even as the ball itself was covered. “Scan it.”

_Come here to steal my pet?_

As Tony crouched near the opposite wall of the cavern, JARVIS reported, “I cannot find the creature in any scannable database, sir.” There were twelve tentacles. The mantle and head swelled to portions that gave the largest sport utility vehicles a run for their money. The beak itself was half as large as the mantle and head combined. The horny beak snapped at the air but the communication, the words, never came from it at all. How the hell could it speak in Tony’s head?

One of the long tentacles with suction cups slithered close to Tony as the creature whispered in his head. _‘You know him. You’ve touched him. Haven’t you? Are you as delicious as my pet?’_

The words sent a chill through Tony but served to enrage him. The idea that this thing, this monster, knew Steve caused his blood to boil and all Tony saw was red, not the bluish purple of the tentacles or the ice around him. The fear fell away and the madness of agony hit him, possessing him. “What the hell did you do to him?” Tony thought of the crashed plane, the little that was left of the Quin Jet. No human remains, nothing but Steve’s shield. The thing before him – Tony stopped himself before the idea took shape in his head. “I’ll fucking kill you!” 

Stretching out his arm, he took aim with his hand repulsor, but then the whole of the creature trembled and the cave around him howled in a ghostly wail. It shook the darkened areas around him and then the creature before him undulated as the tendrils quaked. The beak opened and closed in harmony with the tremors until it settled and another shape – to the right of the creature shifted and came closer. Tony spotted several of the tentacles cradling something as if it was precious and cherished. 

Tony dropped his arm even as JARVIS demanded a response from him. Paralyzed with shock, Tony stood there, tentacles probing and reaching out as the four that held their prisoner displayed him like a piece of meat on hooks in the butchery.

_‘A tender morsel. Don’t you think? My pet came to me. He’s mine and never was yours, my darling.’_

The insanity of it crawled over Tony as if a thousand fire ants bit at his flesh. He watched in horror as the monster displayed the inert form of Steve, naked before him. Steve’s body showed the vestiges of the plane crash, bruises and lacerations that had not healed even after several weeks. Tentacles wound around him, piercing his flesh and muscle. Tears blinded Tony as he recalled Steve’s mutterings after his nightmares - _She has me. She has me. She’s eating me alive. Can’t you see? Can’t you see!_ The idea that the monster terrorized Steve for decades roiled Tony, curdled his stomach until he blanched against it. How? It made no sense. Yet, it nearly threw Tony off his game. He struggled to put the pieces together, to understand how Steve would have been able to function. A man out of time, sure, but a man who sustained decades of punishment within the grip of the beast.

 _‘So tender, so very delicious. And now you’ve come to join him!’_ The cackling laughter in his head woke up Tony to the clear and present danger. JARVIS begged him to listen, to engage the suit’s defenses. Tony jerked into action, he thrust his arms out toward the tentacles that captured Steve’s inert form.

With precise aim, he shot four times, severing the arms of the creature that bound Steve. It shrieked in his head. The screech blinded him of thought. His ears popped and he felt the trickle of blood from his nose. Steve tumbled to the floor of the cavern, not reacting. Rushing to his side as the creature whipped its other eight legs through the air, Tony reached out to touch Steve.

The monster wailed and then commanded _‘He is mine. Do not touch my pet!’_

Silent and still, Steve remained like a corpse, his coloring gray, his arms and legs bruised, limp, and lifeless. Tony could count his ribs; his hip bones stuck out in stark relief against his translucent skin. 

Swallowing back the bile that rose in the back of his throat, Tony raised his repulsors at the creature. “You stay the fuck away from him!” In a barrage, Tony fired an array of repulsor shots and launched the missiles from his shoulder armor. The creature shivered and quaked against the shots, the limbs oozing with a black blood as it curled away from Tony. It cried out and one tentacle slithered across the ice floor as if searching for something, and then Tony saw it hone in on Steve. He concentrated his fire on it and the creature sobbed out.

Tony hurried back to Steve’s side and gathered his unconscious form to him. JARVIS automatically streamed Steve’s vitals across the HUD even as the AI also ran a sidebar keeping tabs on their enemy. 

“His vitals are dangerously low, sir. He is malnourished, has several broken bones that have not mended correctly. His heartbeat is erratic. He is dehydrated.”

“Brain activity?” Tony asked even as his mouth went parchment dry. JARVIS answered with a graph showing clear activity, though it was low. “Conscious?”

“He seems to be comatose,” JARVIS answered. “Sir, I suggest you leave the cave as soon as possible. The creature, though injured, may still attack.” 

Tony scanned the data cascading over the projected screen of the HUD. Barely alive. The cold fact held no mercy for Tony’s fears as he lifted the wasted form of Steve into his arms. A scrape against the rocks behind him alerted Tony that time marched on like an army. Steve wouldn’t survive the trip to the campsite nor the village. Not in the shape he was in and not with anything to protect him from the elements. For a short, crazed moment, Tony considered stripping himself of the armor and putting Steve on it. He discarded it. He needed the suit to transport them and there was no way that Tony could wait out JARVIS depositing Steve safely with his friends. 

“Sir!”

The caw screeched out – not in his head but from the terrible beak of the squid like creature. It snapped not a half meter from Tony’s head. He scooped Steve up into his arms and got this feet. The armor wasn’t made for running but for flying. 

“JARVIS, fire at will,” Tony commanded and felt the shoulder blades of the suit open to launch a new barrage of mini-Jericho rockets into the depths of the cave where the monster lurked. 

Tony ignored the new data on the HUD displaying the attack. The explosions rocked the cave. He swayed on his feet and headed with his precious cargo toward the passageway with the strange otherworldly blossoms. A moan rumbled through the cave and above Tony and to the side a fissure cracked the ice, vibrating the surface of the cave and splitting its sides. Tony clutched Steve closer but hurried forward even with the restraining movements of the armor. He needed to get out as the whole cave heaved and pitched around him. It grumbled as if it was a great beast and Tony stumbled – falling and losing his hold on Steve. Steve tumbled to the icy floor, never waking, never reacting. As Tony slid to a stop he heard the clap and clack of the creature’s beak-mouth and shivered in response. 

“Christ,” he cursed and scrambled to get to his feet. The armor might be a wonder to behold, a graceful and gorgeous piece of advanced design, but movements such as getting up mimicked the actions of a turtle at best. He managed it and crawled over to Steve. The HUD reported no new injuries to compound the ones Steve already had. Gathering Steve in his arms again, Tony clambered to his feet and started away only to have the cave give a fierce quake. For a moment, Tony didn’t know if the sound originated from the creature or from the earth itself.

“Sir, move! I detect seismic activity that will bring the entire crevice and cave down. Collapse is imminent.” 

Tony tucked Steve close to his chest and headed to the entrance, passing the odd iridescent blooms. Pushing past the vine covered wall, Tony noticed the little buds shimmering with each tremor of the cave. The walls around him vibrated as if a prehistoric beast the size of a Tyrannosaurus Rex thudded after him. As far as Tony knew the thing in the cave’s depths might just be a monster from the ages before humanity even crawled out of the muck. He adjusted Steve in his arms, switching to a fireman’s carry; even if it was a little less tender, it would be more secure. The ice around him shifted like tectonic plates, and then the vines startled, all of the buds of the flowers standing straight up. 

The floor beneath his feet rumbled and then the ice split open, the ground fragmenting as if it was shattered like crystal. Tony fell again, smashing his head and mask against the wall as Steve slid out of his arms. The HUD fizzled and flashed, sending waves of nausea through him, and he ripped at the faceplate, trying to get the helmet off. It partially retracted and then stuck in place. Thankfully it was enough to allow him to gag and vomit onto the frozen ground. The ringing in his head from the collision blinded him and he blinked his eyes. Gripping the rest of the useless helmet, Tony managed to get it to full retract. It wouldn’t be good, trying to get back to the campsite without it, but that was the least of his worries now as he fought the dizzying effects of a concussion. 

The roar of the ice as it exploded around him jerked him back to reality. The creature behind him caused the upset of the cavern and the whole place was collapsing. Getting on his hands and knees, Tony crawled over to Steve’s crumpled form. He went to roll him over and assess his injuries when the cave came alive. The wall of vines shivered in anticipation and then spewed out a frothy foam that hit Tony square in the eyes and mouth. He choked on it, vomiting again.

“Sir!” JARVIS said into Tony’s back-up earbud. 

The rest of what JARVIS said was lost to Tony as the guck from the blossoms seared in his eyes and burned his throat. He coughed and pawed at his mouth, but he didn’t have anything to rinse out and spitting did nothing to help it at all. Tears ran down his cheeks and he wiped it away. His sight blurred and he searched around for Steve again. With touch, he found Steve’s arm as the whole world rattled around them, the earth shaking beneath him. 

“Sir, the beast is coming.”

“Holy shit,” Tony gasped as he spit out the last of the foam from the plants. He needed help and he needed it now. “Send an alert.” What the fuck was it? 

“I have, sir. Colonel Rhodes is on his way.”

Steve groaned as Tony gripped his shoulders, preparing to lift him. It might be a good sign that Steve struggled toward consciousness. Whether it was a good thing at that moment, Tony left up in the air to answer. Ice chunks fell from the ceiling of the cave, raining down like hail. The vines vibrated and oozed the slim and frothy foam, exuding a stench like a rotting corpse. The thought that Steve could have been a corpse, slowly decaying in the frozen hell cave, struck Tony as he fought the tears still stinging his eyes. With renewed dedication, Tony heaved Steve into a fireman’s carry once again even as his precious load cried out. He stumbled through the ruin of the cave as it crashed around him in a tumultuous quake caused by the creature behind them. Tony didn’t look back, yet he felt the thing, the monster, behind him as the hairs on the back of his neck stood up and the very air around him thickened and stilled. 

The whip of a tentacle slashed against his leg and Tony screamed, a wordless noise. He managed to slipped out of its grasp, but another arm of the thing wrapped around his other leg, tugging him to the floor of the cave again. He slipped and slid, Steve dropping again to the ground. Tony blasted the appendage, smelling the burnt flesh and suffering as the monster screeched in his head. Freed, Tony grabbed Steve and pushed to his feet. He needed to get out and get out now. No stopping, no thought. Without the HUD he needed to verbally command JARVIS and not use line of sight command.

“Rocket boosters. Fly JARVIS, fly!”

“Sir, the terrain-.”

“I don’t give a fuck about the terrain.” The cave juddered and boulders of ice thundered around him. “Go, go!”

“Colonel Rhodes is-.”

“Now!” Tony fought to keep his footing. Abruptly, the jets of his boots fired and he lifted into the air. The boom of ice and the scream of the creature resounded in the cave. JARVIS took control and shot Tony with Steve through the crevice that he’d only recently walked. With JARVIS as his pilot the armor careened through the chaos of the avalanche. The shoulder plates opened and blasted debris out of the way. He looped low as the side of the mountain rumbled and the monster behind him reached out and twisted an appendage around his boot only to have JARVIS fire off more missiles. As the floor of the cave surged upward, JARVIS launched another round of missiles as the suit shot up and out of the cave. Behind them the monster wailed and then the whole of the mountain tumbled, collapsing inward. 

The cold wind burnt his face and he could only imagine the frigid air on Steve’s nude body, but as he flew over the snowy landscape, he spotted a streak headed toward him. Rhodey. The suit veered toward the light. 

JARVIS reported, “Colonel Rhodes carries supplies, sir. I will land the armor at a designated meeting point.”

Tony chattered as he spoke. “G-g-good.”

The frost on his eyelashes made it difficult to blink and the tears in his eyes froze as they leaked down his cheeks. Rhodey descended as did Tony with Steve. He was surprised he’d managed to keep a hold on Steve considering how chilled he’d become on the short flight. But then JARVIS released the arm and Tony realized that his AI had secured Steve to his shoulder. Even as he did, Tony fumbled and nearly lost hold of a very naked Captain America. Rhodey immediately relieved Tony of his burden, covering Steve with a blanket. 

“Do you think you can make it back to camp without the faceplate?”

Tony only nodded. What mattered now was Steve. “L-let’s g-go.” 

For only a moment, he turned around and stared into the distance where the snow-covered landscape had already shifted, changed, and transformed wiping away any lasting marks of the creature and the cave that had imprisoned Steve over these last weeks. Or had it been years? Had the creature lured Steve back to this place, this location that haunted his dreams because it had tortured him for seventy years? 

Tony shivered in his armor.

“Sir?” JARVIS said as Rhodey took off toward the camp with Steve in his arms.

“Yeah. Let’s go,” Tony said. The desolate place in the darkness of the day only whispered winds and no answers.

PART II  
“He’s not shivering!” 

“Shallow breathing, unconscious. No signs of frostbite.”

Tony stood to the side of the small hospital emergency room. He wanted desperately to get Steve to a state of the art hospital, have the best doctors and nurses work on him, but Rhodey convinced him to let the SHIELD clinic assist in getting Steve ready for transport. A gaggle of nurses and two doctors bunched around Steve’s inert form. His skin, pale and translucent, reminded Tony of raw poultry skin. He tasted bile in the back of his throat as he watched the crew around Steve. They hooked up wires, tubes, and monitors. Warmed blankets were cuddled around Steve and all Tony could think of was the moment he first held Steve in his arms, how right and true it felt. 

They hadn’t made love that night; they hadn’t even really fooled around at all. They’d simply sat and talked as the veil of night shrouded the city, but the lights of humanity shined like stars in the penthouse’s windows. Somehow or another Steve had lingered after a night Tony invited the team to his place for a little get together. Tony never liked parties and never held them outside his public persona needs, but something told him to call them all together. 

When everyone left with all the pleasantries over, Steve stayed to help with cleaning up as he put it. He’d told Tony that he had to because otherwise his poor mother, bless her soul, would haunt him mercilessly for not helping the host. Tony had tried to convince Steve that he had wait staff and robots to do the chores, but Steve still cleared the plates and the bowls of salsa from the lounge area where they’d all gorged on a banquet of the best finger foods in the city. It had been an evening of halting conversation at first, until Steve brought up the good old days. Nat and Clint jumped in and suddenly Tony watched as disparate people became more of a team. 

Later after Steve finished clearing the plates, they both ended up back in the living room on the couch, each on one end. Tony confessed his early adoration for Captain America and then his teenaged resentment of the man who’d stolen his father. When Steve started to apologize, Tony stopped him.

“Why? Why are you apologizing? You didn’t do it. It was Howard. It was all Howard’s decision,” Tony said as he placed his empty tumbler on the coaster on the side table. “We didn’t like one another.”

“Seems funny, considering you two seem a lot alike,” Steve had said. That had rankled Tony, but Steve put his hands up in surrender. “Hey, I knew your dad when he was, what? In his twenties? People change. Times change.” Steve had looked out of the windows then. “Times change a lot.”

When he’d said it, Tony was sure that Steve hadn’t meant for it to be an opening. Yet the words drew Tony like a drawstring toward Steve. He ended up just inches from Steve, one leg bent under him, then other dangling from the couch; his knee touching Steve’s knee. “Well, the resentment faded.”

Steve smiled ruefully. “And I suppose that adoration died, too.”

“Well, I wouldn’t call it adoration anymore,” Tony had teased. They’d talked then, about everything and anything. Night turned into early dawn and Tony found himself half passed out on the couch with a super soldier in his arms, his weight a pleasant pressure against Tony’s side. He missed that weight these many weeks. And now, as he stared at what was left of Steve (so thin, so emaciated, so insubstantial – Christ, he looked old and wizened in a way), he couldn’t stop himself from longing for the earlier days, the innocent days. But had there ever been innocent days?

Steve had been haunted since the beginning. Since they dug him out of the ice. SHIELD dug him out of the ice. And now Tony stood in a SHIELD outpost, waiting for their medical staff to perform a miracle. 

A nurse approached Tony, pestering him to check on his injuries. He felt the sting of the burns on his face from the crap the vines shot at him, but he waved her off. The cold had numbed it all and as he warmed the burn increased in pain and irritation, but it was nothing in comparison to Steve. His body looked so still, so silent, so…

Devoured. 

A shivered ran through Tony and he placed a hand over his face and tried not to hear the scuttling of the medical staff as they attended Steve. They were saying something about his low core temperature but also about his heart rhythms. 

As directions were called out, one doctor questioned it all, “Do we even try? Christ, this guy is dead or will be soon-.”

Tony stalked right up to the table where the doctor worked on Steve. Grabbing the man, Tony dragged him away from Steve and pulled back an arm to punch the son of a bitch in the face. Only Rhodey’s presence stopped him. 

“Tony, you don’t want to do this!” Rhodey said and slowly peeled Tony’s fingers away from the man’s collar. 

Tony could have held fast, but he released the man and gave him a shove. “I don’t want this bastard anywhere near Steve.” The nurses and other doctor caring for Steve all stopped, frozen by Tony’s words. “If anyone here thinks that Captain America is a lost cause, I want you the fuck out of the room. Now!” No one moved. Tony pushed the one man he’d already singled out away from the triage bay. “Get out.” 

Just as Tony nodded to the staff to continue their work, Natasha and Clint joined them. Nat never wore her emotions. In fact, most days she used her emotions like a mask, to get what she wanted accomplished. Yet now as the stark reality of what had happened to Steve settled over them, life drained out her expression. Where there had always been a sense of arrogance, Natasha’s despondency hollowed out her features. She kept close to Clint even as his expression hardened to an angry shock.

“I have a transport coming to bring him to civilization,” Natasha reported. “They’ll have more experienced doctors.”

“Experienced?” Tony said as they stepped to the side to let the medical staff continue tending to Steve. “What doctors are experienced in some kind of alien creature or monster sucking his life out of him?”

Rhodey bristled at Tony’s tactlessness. Natasha never even squirmed. “I called Pepper and Bruce. They’re both putting together a unit at the Tower. This,” she said and then pointed to the triage bay. “Is only going to get you so far. He needs in depth medical attention. So let’s focus on that.”

Tony managed to nod because the idea that he had to be told that washed over him like a killing wave. So many things over the last few months he’d been blinded to, so much time he wasted not listening to Steve’s nightmares. They weren’t nightmares, not at all. He believed that now.

“I got a call from Fury,” Clint said. “He wants recon done on the cave to ensure this creature is either contained or dead.”

“It has to be dead,” Tony muttered.

“Why do you say that?” Rhodey asked.

“It wouldn’t have let him go if it was still alive. Even after SHIELD rescued him. It had him.” Tony shook his head. He knew he wasn’t making any sense. None of it did. “I can’t tell you why or how I know, I just know. That thing had some kind of psychic connection to Steve that made him take a jet and fly it into the ice on purpose.”

“No one doubts you here,” Natasha said, and he detected the faintest signs of just how much she’d already cracked. Had he done that to her? Had it been his fault that the Black Widow’s very foundation buckled under the weight of what had happened? She continued, “But I bet you want him away from all the prying eyes at SHIELD anyhow.”

Tony admitted that he really hated the idea of SHIELD scientists and medical staff getting their grubby little hands on Steve. One of the first things that Steve confessed to Tony had been his dislike of doctors. How much he dreaded seeing them. It had all happened right after the Battle of New York, after the dinner which nearly found Steve faceplanting on the table. They’d all gone back to the Tower to rest off the battle when Tony ended up finding Steve standing in one of the many bathrooms in the penthouse with his uniform open to the waist. The ugly wound in his side seeped blood.

“Geez, why? Rogers, why didn’t you go to medical on the Helicarrier?” Tony had grimaced when he spotted the burn mark.

“Serum will heal it,” Steve had answered but he continued to dab at it with a gauze. Tony noted the boxes of gauze, scissors, and tape strewn over the bathroom counter. He caught Tony staring at the mess, and said, “I’ll clean it all up. Don’t worry.”

Tony screwed up his mouth and folded her arms over his chest as he leaned against the doorframe. “You don’t like doctors? Who would have thought that Captain America is afraid of doctors?” He snickered then. They were comrades in arms, not friends – not yet.

Steve glanced up from treating his wounds and frowned. “I’m not afraid of doctors. I went to bunches of them as a kid.” He tossed the bloody gauze in the sink. “I spent hours in waiting rooms, hours in exam rooms. Just for my Ma to be told that I had another ailment or there was nothing they could do to help. My Ma would just have to pray. I dislike going to the doctor because there was always something wrong with me. We never got good news. But what we always got? A bill.”

“I thought your mom was a nurse,” Tony said, and he might have wanted to redirect the conversation at that moment because shit, he had started to come to understand that feeling once he had to place a high-tech piece of equipment in his chest. 

“She was,” Steve said. “But it was kind of hard to hold a job when your kid is always sick. Plus, the depression really did a job on our situation.” He finished up cleaning the wounds and then placed a big patch of gauze over the injury. “Lend me a hand?”

Tony hesitated for only a second before he accepted and entered the bathroom. “What do you need me to do, Spangles?”

Steve arched a brow at him. “Okay, Shellhead.” That one stung. “Can you just hold the gauze while I tape?”

“Sure, no problem,” Tony replied and helped adjust the thick wad of gauze against Steve’s torso and flank. “So no on the doctors?”

“Doctors before the serum had only bad news. Doctors after the serum only see me as a specimen. Makes it hard to trust them at all,” Steve had said.

Tony knew how that felt now. Not trusting doctors. He turned his attention back to the triage bay where a nearly frozen Steve fought for his life. Tony turned to Natasha. “When will the transport be here?”

“About an hour,” Natasha said. “I gave them a little time so that the med staff here could get Steve’s stabilized before we fly him all the way back to New York.”

Tony tensed when he heard an hour. The blood in his veins felt as if it might boil in his body. Rhodey placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll tell the doctor here that they’re to stabilize him and get him ready for transport. Meanwhile, you get some medical attention yourself.”

Tony nodded but then stopped Natasha and Clint as they moved to the waiting room. “Could you keep watch on Steve while I let the nurses here check me out?” Underneath, he just wanted to scream - _Don’t let him out of your sight. Don’t let them hurt him!_

Natasha read his mind. “Yeah, we’ll keep their asses on task, Stark.”

“Thanks,” Tony said and walked with Rhodey. His friend guided him to an empty chair and then waved over one of the few nurses not working on Steve. 

“I’m Anne Marie,” she said and set a kit on the tray table beside him. “Is there any way you could sit in the chair, maybe take off the-.” She gestured to the suit.

“The suit and I are one. She wants to take off my body,” Tony said and glared at her. She had short vibrant red hair with sparkles in it. How is that kosher for a nurse? 

Rhodey rolled his eyes. “Take off the armor so that the nice nurse -.”

“With sparkly hair,” Tony added.

“The nice nurse can examine you.” Rhodey growled out the last few words. Tony relented because he knew that in some ways, he taxed Rhodey’s good patience with him. 

The armor released, and Tony stepped out of it. The nurse made a little gasping noise and Tony wasn’t sure what to do about it. Had the woman thought she was going to care for a robot or something? He plopped down in the chair and said, “Can we hurry this up?” He wanted to get back to Steve.

Rhodey seemed to read his mind and said, “Keep him here. I’m going to go and check on Captain Rogers.”

The nurse looked between them and, apparently since Rhodey still had on his armor, decided to follow his orders instead of Tony’s direction. As Rhodey marched off, the nurse turned back to Tony. 

“Can you tell me how you got the abrasions and burns on your neck and face?”

“I think it might be classified. So that’s a no,” Tony said as she poured a bottle of antibiotic wash into the small bowl. She put on gloves.

“I’m going to wash some of the wounds, so I can have a better look. Okay?” Anne Marie said. He only shrugged in reply. The thought of Steve just a few meters away but out of sight terrified Tony. He’d already left him for too long. 

“Can you hurry up?” Tony said. “Nothing’s broken.”

“What is this stuff?” With forceps she plucked off some of the residue that the vines spat at him. 

He studied it as she pulled more of it off of his face. What was he supposed to tell her? Some insane plant and its monster attacked him. This wasn’t Little Shop of Horrors. “Maybe it’s just my aftershave?” 

She glowered at him. “I’m a SHIELD nurse. That means I’ve been trained to spot bullshit.”

“Did you also get training in how to mind your own business?” 

“Tsk, tsk.” Natasha walked over to them, her arms folded in front of her. Somehow, she’d rediscovered her façade, hiding behind that haughtiness she possessed. “Let the nurse do her job and then we can get Steve ready to ride.”

“You said the transport wouldn’t be here for an hour,” Tony said as Nurse Anne Marie from the other side of hell insisted on peeling away all of the substance from the vines that stuck to his face. 

“I did, but I pulled some more strings,” Natasha said as she watched the nurse. “What is that?”

“Poison, nectar, who can tell the difference anymore?” Tony said and batted the nurse’s hand away. “They better be trustworthy, Natasha.”

“They are.” Natasha bent down and stared directly into Tony’s eyes. “Did any of that stuff get in your mouth or nostrils?”

He vaguely recalled tasting something, but he had been busy trying to escape a deranged squid-like creature and rescue his unconscious boyfriend at the time. “I don’t remember.”

“We might need to clean out the contents of your stomach,” Anne Marie announced, and Tony practically snarled at her.

“I don’t have the time for that shit,” Tony said. Natasha warned him with a hard stare. “Does it look like I’m dying?” 

Anne Marie, who had stopped treating the abrasions on his face, shook her head and some of the glitter in her hair floated down onto her shoulders. That could not be sterile. “No.”

“Good, then I’m good. Listen, I’ll get things checked out when I get back to the Tower in New York. I have private doctors and nurses on staff,” Tony said and stood up, going around the nurse. Natasha followed behind him as did the empty armor. Natasha jogged a few paces to catch up with him.

“Slow down, Stark. What are you trying to prove?” 

“Prove?” Tony stopped outside of the bay where strangers strived to save his love. “I’m trying to do what I should be doing. Being by Steve’s side. Where I should have been all of this time, where I should have known something was wrong.”

“I don’t see how you would have been able to predict what happened,” Natasha said, and he watched as she closed down, like paper puzzle folded in on itself. 

“How?” He narrowed his eyes at her. “Do you know he dreamed of that- that thing in the cave for months. He’d wake up in a cold sweat. Sometimes he’d be out of bed, in the corner of the room. His eyes wild and fearful. I ignored it. I put it off as just PTSD, damn it. All I asked him to do was to check with the SHIELD doctors. I should have known better. I should have done something to save him.”

“You did,” Natasha said. “You went out there and found him when we all thought -.”

“It should have never gotten to this. Why did it get to this? SHIELD -.” Tony stopped and glanced around him. This was a SHIELD base. It wasn’t safe. “I have to go and see Steve.”

Natasha waited for a moment before she agreed with a simple bow of her head. “Keep me up to date, will you?”

“Yeah,” Tony said and turned to go. Before he went into the bay, he halted and asked, “Where are you going to be?”

She lifted a brow. “Seems I have some detective work to do.”

He watched her go and appreciated why Natasha performed as such a highly rated profiler. He never even had to speak his doubts about why Steve went on the mission in the first place. Was it a mission? What had actually happened and drawn Steve to that frozen hell? 

As he watched Natasha leave, Tony felt the shiver of cold from the cave assault him. For a long moment, the hustle of the medical staff around him dissipated and the blue walls turned to ice. The clatter and yells of the nurses turned into the wails of the creature. The monster who had taken Steve as its prisoner called to him now. He heard the monster in his head again with its slightly feminine voice and its throaty need slithering through his consciousness. Even as he stood there in a fugue, the limbs of the creature like phantoms seemed to curl around him. He could imagine falling into the abyss. He could imagine letting himself go and succumbing to the needs within its darkened soul.

“Tony?”

He jerked in response to Clint’s call and blinked away the frigid memories of the hell beneath the ice. “Y-yes?”

“Is everything all right? Did the nurse take a look at you?” Clint said. 

“I’m fine. I’m perfectly fine. I need to get to Steve-.” Tony said as he started to push away from his friend, but Clint captured his arm.

“I was coming over to tell you that they wanted to speak with you,” Clint said, and his face look chalky, drained of color and vibrancy. 

“God, he’s dead,” Tony stated, and his knees gelled, but his teammate held him up.

“No, no,” Clint replied. “He’s not, but it’s serious, Tony.” Clint supported Tony, helped him walk the short distance back to talk to the medical staff. Luckily Rhodey joined them and took up position at Tony’s right side.

Everything around him blurred. Tony felt nothing. It wasn’t as if the place was distant and that it lost meaning to him. Walls, floors, windows. It meant nothing at all; the only thing that mattered was Steve. A doctor met Tony, standing directly in front of the gurney that Steve lay on. Wires and tubes and a collection of instruments connected to and surrounded Steve. In better days, Tony would name each instrument and explicitly state the limitations of each and even smirk as his brain catalogued all the ways his medical division of Stark Industries would improve and invent better equipment. Instead, his brain froze on the form of Steve – so still, so quiet, so lifeless.

“Sir, I understand you are one of the co-leaders of the Avengers?” Someone asked him – but it felt as if it wasn’t directed to him.

“Yes, he is,” Rhodey answered. “Come on, Tony. Focus.”

Tony closed his eyes, silenced the whispers of terror, and then attended the doctor. “Yes?”

“Captain Rogers sustained multiple traumatic injuries indicative of high velocity impact. His sternum and ribcage look like they are healing well from the collision. His lungs, mouth, stomach, and entire gastrointestinal track has been contaminated with an unknown substance. It’s a miracle he can still breathe at all. The most egregious of his injuries is his left femur. We believe it was shattered on impact and started to heal but didn’t finish the process. Right now, we have relieved some of the pressure due to the swelling of the leg, but we aren’t sure the serum will actually be able to handle the injury.”

“What?” Tony squinted at the doctor. “What are you saying?”

The doctor paused for a moment, glanced at Rhodey, and then attended to Tony. “Captain Rogers’ leg may need to be amputated.”

“No freaking way,” Clint spouted.

“What the fu-.” Rhodey pressed a hand to Tony’s shoulder but it was the fear and horror that stopped Tony. It bubbled up in the back of his throat, burning and sour. He put a hand to his forehead as his knees failed him again and the chill of the cave swept over him. His mind raced in front of him and Tony heard himself say, “But the serum?”

“It may be the only thing that saved his life. He had a severe case of hypothermia, but once we started iv fluids the serum picked up. It fought the worst of it, and with our treatment he should pull through that. But the leg – it’s been fractured since his plane went down. The serum, for whatever reason, never truly healed it.” The doctor stopped and grimaced. “I’m sorry. I’ll leave it up to the experts in the area. It isn’t an emergency since we’ve relieved the pressure and stabilized the leg as much as possible.”

“Expert,” Tony said, and his vision went blank. Expert. The word made no sense to him at all. He squeezed his eyes shut and thought of Steve – laughing and racing backward as he threw a football in Central Park. They’d all gone out to relax, to pretend the weight of the world didn’t burden their shoulders all the time. Steve threw the ball to Clint as the sun shone down through the leaves, dappling across his face and golden blonde hair. Tony might have fallen a little more in love that day. 

He came back to himself. Clearing his throat, Tony said, “Can I see him?”

“Yes, yes. He’s awake.”

“What?” Tony said as he peered around the doctor. Steve hadn’t moved. In fact, Tony was hard pressed to spot his regular breathing. 

“Please,” the doctor said and then ushered Tony to Steve’s side. 

As Tony approached the bed, Steve never moved, never betrayed that he was awake and aware. For a moment, Tony thought back to the nightmares, those times when they were waking nightmares when Steve would mutter and mumble and reach out to things not in the room and beg for mercy. How could Captain America beg for mercy? What could make Captain America beg? A cold chill ran up Tony’s spine as he realized he knew what it was now, had felt it invade his own brain. Tony reached out and touched Steve’s hand. He understood from intimate experience the idea of begging for mercy. 

“Steve? Steve, baby, you awake?”

Steve shifted on the gurney and it prompted a grimace of pain. He opened his eyes, but barely, as if he wanted to shield himself from the realness of the world around him. Licking his lips, he shook his head and tears stained his face. “Why?”

“What, baby?” Tony said and reached out to cradle his cheek. There were so many bruises, so many cuts. His flesh felt cold like death, the texture of it hung loose on his bones. 

Steve searched Tony’s features as if to steady the world, as if to latch onto something known. He frowned and closed his eyes. “Where were you? Where?”

Tony wiped away the tears leaking from Steve’s eyes, pushed away the grimy hair. “I came as soon as I knew, Steve. As soon as I know, I came to you.”

Steve shuddered at the words and then murmured as if to himself, “Doesn’t matter. She always wins. You’ll see there’s no fighting her. No matter how hard you try.” He didn’t look at Tony again. He wouldn’t respond as Tony asked and asked again what he meant by the cryptic words. Eventually, Rhodey pulled him away and told him to let Steve sleep, but Tony knew better. Steve hadn’t slept.

Not these weeks he had been captured by that thing in the cave.

Not the months he spent with Tony.

Tony relented and let the staff prepare Steve for transport. Natasha had come through, of course. Before the hour was up the transport arrived – how she managed it, Tony never found out, but it was Natasha and her skills always amazed him. The staff prepped Steve and then bundled him in warmed blankets before the Quin Jet appeared and the gurney was rolled out of the SHIELD installation onto the plane to be transferred to the Tower. As the operation proceeded, Tony alerted JARVIS of the status and had all the medical data transferred. 

“Bring in the best. I don’t care how much or where they are. I want them caring for Steve,” Tony said as he spoke into his phone. The armor was in no condition to fly back to New York, so he stored it in the cargo hold of the Quin Jet. 

“Yes, sir.”

Tony disconnected the phone and watched as Natasha and Clint supervised the transfer of Steve onto the plane. God, what had happened? How had it happened? The one thing that lurked below the surface and haunted Tony had been the idea of who Steve really was. For months, Tony had assumed that the serious, yet optimistic Steve Rogers image was the real deal. The one plagued by nightmares and terrified, shaking at night, that one was a soldier afflicted with PTSD. Somehow Tony separated the two in his head, compartmentalized them. And maybe in many ways Steve had, too. Steve operated well during the day. He led the Avengers and worked for SHIELD. He charmed Tony with his hokey old-fashioned ways. The media loved him, and the country trusted him. Yet now, Tony wondered which Steve was the real one. The one that curled with his knees bent in the corner every night, rocking and muttering, or the one that faced the world like a rock – unmovable and strong. 

Denying the reality of what he’d seen in that cave, of what he’d experienced in that cave, would be foolhardy at best, dangerous at worst. “That thing wasn’t from around here.”

“What’s that?” Clint asked as he sidled up to Tony. The last of the pre-flight checks were being run through by the pilot. 

“Nothing,” Tony answered, then reconsidered. “That thing that attacked us, that attacked Steve. I don’t think it was from around here.”

“You mean around here like in the island, or around here like the planet?” Clint stood like he might whip out his bow and shoot a few arrows at anyone who boarded the plane without his express permission. 

Tony scrubbed a hand over his beard and then said, “Planet.” He bowed his head and in a low voice added, “It got into my head. It spoke to me.”

Clint studied him for a moment before answering, “I get that. What’d it say?”

The memories ate away at Tony’s resolve. He shook his head. Even now, she remained very close, just a whisper away like death. “Said she was going to eat him. Like she’d been using him for nourishment.” The nausea rose. It didn’t make sense, of course. How would Steve survive without nutrients himself? 

“Do you think it was telling the truth?”

Tony recalled finding Steve awake at night balled up in the corner, muttering about her. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.” Steve had known about that thing, had encountered her before, and had been captured and tortured before. But when and how?

Clint eyed him as the pilot finished her pre-flight check in. “You got data from the encounter?”

“Yeah,” Tony said. Why he’d decided to confide in Clint, Tony couldn’t fathom. Sometimes it was just easier to talk to someone who didn’t know him, wouldn’t question his anxieties. Someone who would just take him at face value. 

“Well, we’ll check it out when we get back to the Tower. Right?” Clint nodded as if to reassure not only Tony but himself. That small act did more to assuage Tony’s jittery nerves than Clint’s words. 

The pilot announced take off, so Tony cut the conversation short and went to check on Steve as the nurses finished securing him in the gurney pod. The transportation pod for critical cases looked like something out of Star Trek. Across the top of the elongated pod the words Stark Industries: Medical Division was scrawled. A window to check on the occupant graced the top of the pod next to a console panel that scrolled the stasis of the patient. Peering into the pod, Tony saw that Steve looked like he slept, but that might just be a rouse on his part. Tony knocked on the window and Steve shifted and opened his eyes. Smiling, Tony waved and then hit the lock. It opened without pause.

“Hey, you okay?”

Steve looked a little green, like he might throw up. “Yeah, yeah.”

“You need something for the nausea?” Tony asked, even though he had no idea if something like an anti-emetic would work for Steve or not. 

“No, just-. Does the pod have to be closed?” Steve asked. He licked his chapped lips and closed his eyes for a second as if to ward off the nausea. When he opened them again, Tony saw the pain, the desperation, the weakness in his eyes. 

“I can keep it open,” Tony said. It wasn’t the best option. The pod provided a clean environment, circulated fresh oxygen, and filtered out pollutants. Through monitoring, it treated the patient throughout the transport as well. Tony switched it to allow the case to stay open but also for it to continue its regular monitoring of Steve’s welfare. He reached into the pod.

Steve’s pallor still grayed, and his eyes looked sunken. Tony pulled out the nasal cannula from a side pocket and tucked it into Steve’s nostrils. “Sorry, but if we keep this open you need it.”

Steve didn’t protest but the furrow of his brows clearly stated his frustration and his pain. 

“I promise, we have the best coming to take care of you.”

Steve licked his lips and shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.” He flicked his line of sight away from Tony, shivering under his touch. “She has me.”

“No, Steve, no,” Tony whispered as the jet roared to life. “She’s gone. I promise you that. The cave collapsed. She’s dead. Gone.”

Steve whined as the jet rumbled and shook. The vibrations were muted by the pod, but the fact remained that no amount of painkillers could help him. It must have been bad because Tony had seen Captain America take hits that literally sliced the skin from his body and he never flinched. Steve’s leg was a mess, the femur in pieces. Tony checked the bindings to ensure that it was stabilized. 

“Strap in. Can’t take off until you do,” Clint called from the front. He must have taken over the piloting. Tony wondered at that but figured that he did it to ensure their safety. All of them had their little quirks when it came to taking care of the team.

Tony waved at Clint to signal he’d heard. He took the seat next to the transport medical pod, the one reserved for doctors. “I’m right here. Once we’re cruising, you’ll be able to see me again.”

Steve didn’t respond and by the time the jet got to cruising altitude, he’d either passed out or fallen asleep. Either way, Tony was grateful. He sat back down. What the hell had happened over the last few weeks? Or decades? What the hell was that thing? He was sure that SHIELD would be swarming over the place, turning over all the ice boulders to figure it out. But it irked him, down deep in his bones, that Steve had gone out on some farce mission and ended up tortured by that thing – again. Because he knew it was again. All the pieces fit into place. 

Yet they didn’t. It felt like he looked at the world through a prism that broke up everything into pieces and reflections that couldn’t be put together again.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, Tony fell asleep. It should have been refreshing to finally sleep without worry about where Steve was, but it wasn’t. Steve wasn’t out of the woods yet. His leg – he might still lose it. Plus, that thing haunted him and still did. Psychologically, Steve had a long way to go. Tony put it down to that when he jerked awake with images of the creature slithering through his dreams. He shivered as the memory faded – a memory of tentacles, tempting and luring him closer.

Finally at the Tower, the medical staff met them at the ramp of the Quin Jet. Tony frowned as he thought of how Steve would casually leap out of the jet without even a parachute. He’d give a smirk and a wink to Tony and then go for broke. The first time he did it, Tony’s heart seized in his chest. Steve was a daredevil and a little cuss sometimes. Tony thought he got his jollies out of scaring the shit out of Tony. 

Tony watched as the care of his boyfriend was transferred to his trusted medical staff. A doctor he didn’t recognize walked up the ramp and greeted Tony. “Mister Stark, it’s good to meet you, though not under these circumstances. I’m Doctor Marc Alvarez. I understand that Captain Rogers has sustained severe injuries to his femur?”

Tony inhaled once, held it, and then exhaled. How he would savor the moments when he didn’t need to take a breath to calm his nerves. “Yes. You signed all of the non-disclosure, and confidentiality paperwork?”

“Yes, Ms. Potts was kind enough to go through all of the documents. I’m eager to help. Captain America has always been something of hero to me.”

Tony wanted to say something crass and sarcastic, but at the same time, this little bald-headed guy with the sharp nose and wire glasses perched on his head was the only person who could save Steve’s leg. If JARVIS picked him, then he had to be the best. “Good to know,” Tony managed to say. “The pod has all the medical data in it. If you could take a look, that would be great. I need you to confer with Doctor Bruce Banner.”

“Excuse me, Mister Stark, but I am an expert in orth-.”

“You’re not expert in the serum. He is.” Tony bit back the rest of his words, stopping the barrage of curses. “Listen, you have to work with Bruce. The serum is like nothing you’ve worked with before. If you don’t take that into account, then you really don’t need to be here.”

Alvarez put up his hands. “Sorry. I didn’t think. Of course, I will talk with Doctor Banner. Could you please show me to him and the patient?”

It was Clint who ended up ushering the good doctor to the medical floor of the Tower as well as introducing the orthopedic surgeon to Bruce. Tony found himself shuffled off the jet and to his private suite in the penthouse by Rhodey. “Get a shower and some rest. I will call you when the doctors are finished examining him.”

Tony wanted to protest, but Pepper joined Rhodey in forming a blockade of the door. It was ludicrous, but he knew that they were only acting for his own good. He went through the motions. When he entered his ensuite bathroom, Tony closed the door, locked it, and then slid down to the floor. His hands shook as he sat there. The images, the cold of the cave, the way the skin hung from Steve’s face as if he’d aged a hundred years, swarmed over him like a plague of locust eating away at his brain. He had managed to keep it together. Tony Stark, the persona, had taken over and his composure never cracked. Yet he thought of Steve lying in the pod, a slim shade of what he used to be, and the terror ebbed off him in waves. Tony fragmented, slowly and completely. He wept, quietly. JARVIS let him, gave him the space he needed to succumb to his emotions. 

All those weeks, he waited for Steve. First, as a dutiful boyfriend waiting for his love to come back from a mission, then as an Avenger enraged when he found out the mission had hidden dangers. Finally, Tony took it upon himself to seek out the trail and find Steve. Now what did he have left? The memories, the horror. 

Somehow, through the haze, Tony climbed back into himself – maybe back into the persona again – and showered and dressed. After shaving and trimming his beard, he packed up some supplies to bring to Steve and then headed to the medical floor. Neither Rhodey or Pepper stopped him. 

The elevator opened on the medical floor. The lobby of the floor presented a pristine, even serene environment. The windows to the cityscape below were undressed but sitting areas and a bar to the side offered someplace to wait and to get refreshments. He ignored it and headed directly to the treatment area. As he approached, Tony spotted both Banner and Alvarez together, obviously discussing Steve’s case. 

Bruce caught sight of Tony first and stopped. He acknowledged Tony with a quick wave and tentative smile. “Tony, been talking with Doctor Alvarez.”

“Marc.”

Bruce gave that same weak smile to the doctor. “Yes, and we have some news.”

Tony clutched the bag he held and peered around the spacious med station. He knew that just around the curving counter toward the left were the treatment rooms. Beyond that housed the patient rooms. “Where’s Steve?”

“Right now, he’s resting in his room. We wanted to talk to you about his treatment first,” Alvarez said and gestured to one of the treatment rooms. Tony followed, though he gave Bruce the side eye. 

As they entered the room, Bruce said, “Listen to Doctor Alvarez. He knows what he’s doing.”

Tony bit his tongue and nodded. He just wanted to see Steve. Take care of him. Help him.

“Now, first you have to know that Captain Rogers suffered some kind of poisoning. According to the information I received, this poisoning was due to a creature of some sort?” Alvarez said.

“Yeah, big, tentacles, beak. Creepy. Nightmare inducing,” Tony said but then cut off because the last was too real to face.

“Some of your doctors on staff have it well in hand. The serum, as Doctor Banner has described to me, should take care of most of the poisoning. His malnutrition is another problem.” Alvarez glanced at Bruce.

“Steve’s so weak, he can barely eat. He’s having trouble with coordination. Plus, he’s experiencing nausea which makes it difficult for him to get enough down. We’ve thought about a gastric tube-.”

“Force feeding him?”

“With a pump, attached to the outside. Not through his nostril,” Bruce said. “It would be the fastest way to feed the serum. We need the serum to be at one hundred percent – it’s not right now.”

Tony twisted his mouth, feeling the slight twinge in his gut in sympathy for Steve. “Okay, what else?”

“The biggest issue is the leg. We’ve relieved the swelling, but the fact remains his leg was shattered at some time in the past, the serum tried to heal it if I understand Doctor Banner correctly,” Alvarez said as he nodded to Bruce. “But it did it wrong and not completely. We need to break the shaft of the femur again. Multiple times, in something that would be equivalent to a comminuted fracture. In order to fix it, then we will need to do what’s called intramedullary nailing.”

“Nailing? Does that mean what I think it means?” Tony said, and his heart ratcheted up in pulse and rapidity. 

Bruce sighed and bowed his head, before looking back up at Tony and grimacing. Alvarez addressed the elephant in the room. “Yes, it does. Intramedullary nailing is inserting a specially designed rod into the marrow canal. The rod keeps the pieces in place. An intramedullary nail is slid into place at the hip or the knee. It’s not very invasive, a small incision. Then I’ll screw it in at both ends to ensure a stable fixation.”

Tony blanched and then glared at Bruce. “Does he know what he’s asking? Does he have any idea what he’s saying?”

“I told him that sedation doesn’t usually work on Steve,” Bruce said. His hands on his hips, Bruce looked about to give up. “But there’s not much else. I have an agent that might work. I tried to use it on the Hulk. It could work for Steve.”

“Enough that he won’t feel this _very_ invasive procedure?” Tony asked. 

“I can’t promise anything, but, Tony, you have to understand that he won’t be able to walk on his leg now. If we don’t do something, the serum will continue to remodel the leg and could possibly deform it even more.” Bruce gave that pathetic smile again. “We’re 3D printing the nail so that it will slowly be absorbed by the serum. He’ll be good as new again probably in a month or two once we get the serum up to par. Most people would have at least a half year or more to recover from this kind of injury.”

“God,” Tony muttered and then slumped his shoulders. All the tension and the hell of the last days streamed out of him until his joints disintegrated. He barely understood how he stood upright. Blinking away the shock and trauma, he said, “Can I see him?”

“Yes, yeah,” Bruce said and waved Alvarez away. He gripped Tony’s shoulder and escorted him to Steve’s private room. It wasn’t as private as Tony would have liked since Steve was under critical care observation by the nursing staff. “He’s stable, but remember he suffered hypothermia, malnutrition, poisoning, among other things.”

“Yeah,” Tony said as he held onto the sac he clutched. “Can I see him alone?”

They walked into the outer room that had a glass wall between the critical care observation station and the main hospital room. The glass wall also served as a computer monitor where statistics and life signs were streamed. Tony half glanced at them but didn’t concentrate on any of the data. He could always have JARVIS send the information to him later. What he did gaze at was beyond the numbers, and figures, and cold reality – Steve. In the bed with a blanket pulled up to his chest, wires attached to his chest, arms, and back. The glow of the cave still hung about him. Those wires mimicked the tentacles of the creature. Even with all of the modern-day trappings around him, that thing, that creature, shadowed him. Tony shuddered in response and physically shook it away. It was almost as if he could hear the creature’s voice again.

“Yeah,” Bruce said and then quietly asked the nurse at the station to step out. He gave Tony one last look before he left as well.

Tony inhaled, held it, and then exhaled before he entered Steve’s hospital room. When the shuffle of his shoes hit the floor, Steve turned his head and opened his eyes. The nasal cannula still fed him oxygen. Dark circles rimmed his sunken eyes and the scattering of hair across his jaw mocked the strength his features once possessed. Steve tightened his mouth into a frown but also reached out to Tony.

Without pause, Tony crossed the distance between them and grasped Steve’s hand. “Oh, baby.” Tears stung his eyes again. “Why, why, why?” He didn’t know what he was asking, and he didn’t know if there was an answer or even what he truly wanted to hear, but Tony brought Steve’s battered hand to his lips and kissed the knuckles. 

Steve shook his head and the tears ran down his face in quiet company to the ones staining Tony’s cheeks. “Tell me,” Steve started, his voice weak and barely audible. “Tell me you’re free.”

“We’re both free, baby. I got us both free. She’s gone. She’s gone,” Tony said, and noticed how frigid Steve’s fingers were. He grasped Steve’s hand in both of his, trying to warm him. “You’re okay. We’re both okay. She’s gone now. You’re free.” It should feel like a victory but the haunted hollowed look on Steve’s face jarred Tony, chilled his nerves, caused a kind of creeping sensation to crawl up Tony’s spine. 

Steve studied him as if weighing if Tony was telling the truth. He softened his features as he looked. “She never leaves you. Tell me she didn’t get you. Tell me you’re free. Tell me you’re alive.”

“She didn’t. I’m standing right here,” Tony said as if that was proof enough. “Regardless, she’s dead.”

Steve looked away, tried to adjust his half-reclined position in the bed, but couldn’t move due to how they had his leg immobilized. “I thought she was dead before,” Steve murmured. “When SHIELD saved me, but she wasn’t. She wasn’t.”

“No,” Tony said and held firmly to Steve’s hand. “No, she wasn’t. But this time I did it. She’s gone. The whole cave collapsed on her.” 

The conversation drained away the last remaining energy Steve had, and he sank down into the cushions, inert and staring into the middle distance. It terrified Tony to see him, almost catatonic in his demeanor. This wasn’t Captain America. This wasn’t the man he loved all those months. This was a shell. This was the remnants of a man who sacrificed himself to that ghoul in the cave. But why?

“Why?” Tony asked. “Why did you do it?” He couldn’t stop himself from asking. Steve had made the sacrifice play on the Valkyrie, but this – this action was just plain insanity. “Why did you go to her? Why didn’t you have us help you? You shouldn’t have gone alone.”

Steve turned to stare at Tony, his eyes pale and nearly colorless in his ashen face. “You know why.”

This wasn’t the Steve Rogers he knew. He felt like he was staring at a mirage. Yet, underneath the empty expression, Tony had to believe the man who made Captain America a real hero still existed. To Tony, the shell before him echoed the promises of a man who once held the ideals of a nation in his hands, but now everything about him crumpled. Tony imagined Steve would flake and blow away. He felt so distant and foreign and lost. “Steve, you left. You didn’t call on us. You of all people. Why?”

Steve looked away, and even that small movement caused him pain. He grimaced but never moaned. His expression changed, transformed slightly into the Steve Tony knew and loved. “Sometimes someone has to make the sacrificial play.”

It made no sense. “That thing, that monster, was in a cave in the Arctic. There wasn’t any danger to anyone, and you know that! You can’t tell me you did this, you went to her and let her-.” Tony swallowed down the bitterness of the truth. He shouldn’t be angry at Steve, shouldn’t berate him. He took a calming breath and said, “Steve, you know you need some help. You need someone to help you, to talk to you.” To stop you from trying to kill yourself – he wanted to say but gulped it down with the stomach acid in the back of his throat.

Steve stared into the middle distance, but then with a jerk of his head, he looked to Tony. “I did what needed to be done.”

“What?” Tony said. The flood of anguish erupted out of him. “You went to that creature and sacrificed yourself. Let it eat you. Look at what’s left! You nearly died. Steve.” He grabbed at Steve’s hands again, squeezing frantically. “Don’t you get it? You didn’t need to do this. You had a choice and it lured you there. What’s the link? If you had just told someone- if you had just-.”

“I did,” Steve stated and his words like fire burned Tony’s anger to ashes. 

“What?”

“I told you,” Steve said and then silence dropped over them. 

Tony blinked, and the tears streamed down his face. Bowing his head, he gazed at their clasped hands through the blur of his tears. It was true. Steve had told him, in a daze of his nightmares. He’d told Tony. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize,” Tony said and sniffled. “I didn’t know. I thought it was a bad dream.” He wanted to fill the space, the quiet, but the more he tried, the emptier it became until it was a chasm between them. “Please.”

“I need to sleep.” 

Tony wanted to say something more, wanted to throw down the planks to build the bridge between them, but Steve turned to face away from him and closed his eyes. No terms would bring him back. Tony nodded, patted Steve’s hand, and then said, “I’ll be right outside. I’m right here. Okay?”

Steve didn’t answer. 

Tony shuffled away, stopping once to glance over his shoulder to see Steve absently gazing into the middle distance again. What might he see there? What horrors replayed in his head? Tony had no right to force Steve to respond to him, to be the person he was before immediately, especially since that person had been a façade. God, the whole thing throbbed and pounded in his head. He rubbed at his temples as he stepped out of the room. 

“Hey.” Natasha stood there, waiting for him, her expression soft and fierce at the same time. “You look like you need to sleep for a week.”

“My boyfriend was captured by a damned nightmare and I should have stopped him,” Tony muttered and then looked at her with bleary eyes. He glimpsed that shrewd character in her stance, her expression that always signaled more of the story to come. “What is it?”

“I think we should talk,” Natasha said. “Somewhere away from here.” She eyed the medical staff. These weren’t SHIELD personnel but when it came to cloak and dagger, Tony had to trust her. She knew more than she ever would admit. 

He brought her to the elevator but as they left, Bruce caught his arm. “Doctor Alvarez is going to try and repair Steve’s leg. I have that sedative I tried on the other guy. Hopefully it will work.”

“When?”

“With a normal patient they’d wait until he was more stabilized as far as his other injuries, but I think we can do this today. Alvarez is making the final plans now.” Bruce waited for Tony as if he wanted his approval.

“I’ll wait and see the plan before I give my consent,” Tony said. Steve was awake and aware; he’d be the one to give consent but at the same time, he didn’t seem engaged. 

“Okay, don’t stray too far,” Bruce said as he saw them head toward the elevator.

“Just have JARVIS get me,” Tony said, and he entered the elevator car with Natasha. Instead of telling the car to go to the penthouse, Tony chose his workshop level. The car descended and when it opened Tony stepped to the transparent doors leading to his workshop and allowed the retina recognition scan him. The lock popped open and they entered. Tony ordered, “JARVIS, secure level 3.”

“Secure level 3, sir.”

The transparent doors turned opaque. “Now, what is it you have to tell me?”

Natasha surveyed his workshop once. She’d been to visit the place more than once, but her eyes stopped at certain areas as if to assess the security. “Okay then,” she said. “The mission was sanctioned by SHIELD.”

“Yeah, we know that,” Tony said and why did his heart ram so loudly in his ears?

“Steve asked not to go,” Natasha said. “But then he changed his mind. He went.”

“What? He never said that. He went-.” Tony stopped. He went like a good little soldier. Like he wanted to do it and get it over with and -.

“He went so we wouldn’t have to. The WSC and Pierce said if Steve didn’t go, then the Avengers would have to go.”

“But why?” Tony asked. “What was the purpose?”

“I’m still teasing that out,” Natasha replied. “But it looks like the mission was to retrieve and capture.”

“What!” Tony cried out. “Retrieve and capture that thing? That thing that tried to kill Steve?”

“That thing that captured Steve seventy odd years ago,” Natasha said and that stopped him because it confirmed his suspicions. 

“Ho-how did you find this out? How?” Tony quaked. His whole body felt cold and the memory of the slip of her tentacle across the armor felt more intimate, more invading that it should. He recalled the taste of the crap the blossoms spit at him and gagged. An almost lullaby of memory overcame him and enticed him. He fought it and turned back to her. “How?”

She pulled out a memory stick. “Here. It’s all the data they had.” He didn’t touch the thumb drive as she placed it on the table between them. “And Tony, they still want it, her. They’ll send him back if we don’t do something to stop them.”

“Well, fuck them!” Tony snapped. “They can just fuck themselves. He’s not going back. She’s dead and gone.” He shook his head and paced between two of the lab consoles. “Why didn’t they just kill her when they saved him the first time?”

“Look at the drive. then we can plan.” Natasha stuffed her hands in the pockets of her short leather jacket. 

As Natasha left him, Tony toyed with the thumb drive and only one thought came to him. If the mission had been for Steve to be sent back to hell, why did he go so willingly? Or had that thing so infested his brain that he couldn’t say no? What horror was SHIELD playing with? Tony pocketed the thumb drive and headed back to the medical floor. He needed to see Steve. He needed to know that the Steve he saved was still _his_ Steve.

When he arrived, the medical staff on call were hustling about the curved nurses’ station. There weren’t any other patients but Steve so whatever was going on had to center on the Captain. Tony caught sight of Fury standing in the corridor, arms crossed, and a decidedly pissed off look on his face. Tony never paused. He went in for the attack. 

“What the hell? What the hell did you do to him?”

Fury turned to face Tony. “I’d be careful who you accuse of doing anything to the greatest soldier in our history.”

“Well, then you tell me what the hell SHIELD had in mind? Sending him alone,” Tony said as he fingered the thumb drive in his pocket. 

A look of exhaustion mixed with exasperation shifted over Fury’s features. “I suppose Natasha has been places and seen things she shouldn’t have.”

“She’s a better spy than you think.”

“In fact, she’s better than we all think,” Fury said, then he raised his hands in surrender. “I’m not here to fight with you, Stark. I’m here to help.”

“How the hell can you help?” Tony asked. The idea that Fury and Pierce schemed to cause harm to Steve irked Tony, but he swallowed down the anger in order to figure out what the hell was going on.

It was Bruce who answered him, “He had more of the supply of the sedative I created for the Hulk. By the way, Steve’s asking for you. They’re prepping him for surgery.”

“Surgery?” Tony almost stammered because he wasn’t ready. He hadn’t even seen the treatment plan, but then again, he had no authority over Steve. Steve must have given consent. And that chilled Tony – consent. Did he consent to going on that mission alone? Did he want to go on that mission alone? He needed to see Steve again, but then the words solidified, and he asked, “Where is he?”

“Same room,” Bruce said and thumbed it behind him. 

Tony pushed them aside and raced to Steve’s room. The hustle and bustle of the medical staff paused as he walked into the hospital room. Doctor Alvarez put up a hand and asked everyone to leave the room. He focused on Tony. “Help him.” He left without any further explanation.

When Tony glimpsed Steve, he understood. A wild, haunted look troubled his features. “Steve?” Before Steve seemed closed off to Tony, but now he reached out – the damaged look turning to real fear. Tony grabbed Steve’s hand. “What? It’s okay. They have a sedative that should work.”

“No, no, no,” Steve said and shook his head. The way he acted, the way he quaked, reminded Tony of those nights he would wake up terrified of the memories – of that monster in the ice. “You don’t, you don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?” Tony said, and he held back his own tears because of the fear imprisoning Steve. This wasn’t Captain America – this was a war-weary soldier horrified of the past. Yet his horrors were layered beyond that of war. “Steve, tell me. Tell me?”

“I tried to stop her. This time I tried. But she still-.” He squeezed his eyes shut and the tremors that rocked him shook the bed, upsetting his leg. “I just wanted to stop her, stop her from hurting anyone else.”

“Steve, you have to calm down. You need to calm down,” Tony said and peered over his shoulder – frightened that the nurses would come and tear him away from Steve.

“Tony, if I go under, I don’t know if she’ll have me again. I wanted to stop her for good. I went. I had to go. To stop her.”

Those words froze in his head. _I had to go._ He needed more. He needed Steve to make him understand. “Steve?”

“Don’t let her take me,” Steve said as he clutched onto Tony’s shoulders, his strong hands pressing deep and bruising. “If they take me, she’ll come back.”

“No,” Tony said and cupped Steve’s cheek with his hand. “She’s gone. I killed her. You don’t have to worry. Steve, you’re safe.”

“Safe?” Steve looked up where the window to the observation room was and then back to Tony. “What about you? Are you safe? Are we?”

“What?” He’d answered this before, Steve knew that Tony was safe.

Steve mummed up as the doctor and nurses reappeared in the room. “I’m sorry, Mister Stark, but I think we should move forward with the surgery.”

“Tony?” Steve said, and his voice sounded small, like a child’s.

“It’ll be okay. I’m right outside. I’m right there for you,” Tony said and knew his words were meaningless platitudes. The nurses and other staff converged on the gurney and Tony was gently pushed aside as Steve laid back but stared helplessly as they rolled him out of the room. He never said a word, but he kept his eyes fixed on Tony until the staff rolled him out of the room. 

Tony rubbed at his eyes. He should have tried to sleep or something. He walked out of the room to find Bruce, Natasha, and Fury waiting for him. “Is that stuff going to work?” 

Bruce nodded. “It should.”

“That’s not a good answer,” Tony said and wondered if he should follow the gurney to the surgical suite. 

“They told us they would come and get us if there was a problem,” Natasha said.

“Sure, they will,” Tony said and he grimaced. These were his own people, not SHIELD’s. He had to trust someone. “Listen, I don’t want to hear about how upstanding SHIELD was on Steve’s account. They weren’t. At all.”

“You don’t think I know that?” Fury spat back.

“You think you could possibly say something with meaning once in a while?” Tony retorted. He shook his head. “Steve was pushed into a trap. For some godless reason, he thought he was doing the right thing. But SHIELD had other plans. Why? Can you tell me that? Why?”

Bruce glanced amongst them and stepped away. “I’m just gonna go wait in the waiting room. Where it’s calm and not – not this.” He waved at them and left. 

Once he left, Tony turned back to Natasha and Fury, though his focus centered on the Director. “He trusted you. Should he have?”

“I trust Pierce.” Fury looked down and then said, “Pierce declined the Nobel Peace Prize. He said peace wasn't an achievement. It was a responsibility. I respect him for that. I’ve worked with him for decades. If he thought it was a good idea to capture that thing to study it, then, yes, I trust his word.”

“Trust doesn’t come easily for you,” Natasha said. “Pierce sanctioned the mission.”

“He must have had his reasons for sending Cap without backup,” Fury said but at the same time Tony noted the shift in his features from confidence to doubt – self-doubt. Seeing that in Nick Fury threw Tony. 

“Steve wanted that creature destroyed,” Tony said. “And SHIELD wanted it to study. Which did Pierce want?”

Fury closed the gap between them. “I’ll remind you that we are in an unsecure facility-.”

“Unsecure? You think SHIELD is more secure than this tower? Think again,” Tony replied. “Now, tell me, why didn’t SHIELD call the Avengers in?”

Natasha cleared her throat. “I told you we were still teasing that out.”

“They wanted to retrieve it, right?” Tony asked. “They wanted it for a reason. They used Steve for a reason. There must be data.” Tony pulled out the thumb drive. “Is it on this?”

“Some of it,” Natasha said. “What I could find.”

Tony glanced back at the surgical suite room doors and then to the thumb drive in his hand. He promised Steve to stay – could he trust the two spies in front of him? “Would it be possible for once for the two of you to be like normal people and stay here and watch out for Steve while I get JARVIS to start analyzing this?”

Fury narrowed his one eye at Natasha, obviously none too happy about the development of SHIELD data in Tony’s hands. It wouldn’t be the first time Tony had their information and it surely wouldn’t be the last. Fury relented, and he said, “Just like the Tesseract.”

“Son of a bitch. An army from outer space didn’t teach SHIELD a lesson? This thing that attacked Steve seventy years ago and you sent him back to – !” Tony asked incredulous at Fury’s arrogance – at SHIELD’s conceit. 

“That’s highly classified information, Stark. Right now, all you need to know is that SHIELD has it in hand.”

“Well they didn’t a day ago. What happened in between?” Tony scoffed. “If SHIELD really wanted it handled, it would have sent all of us. SHIELD won’t have extorted Steve.” Tony leapt to a conclusion on that one, but when he read Fury’s expression he knew it was true. “Fuck you. Just fuck you.” He left before Fury or Natasha could call him back. He went directly to his workshop floor, put all the necessary security measures in place, and then slid the drive into place. “JARVIS, drive, data, analyze. No one has access to it but me.”

“As you say, sir. How would you like to me secure the drive?”

“Take everything off of it now and then scramble it.”

It only took a few minutes to set everything up but to Tony it felt like hours. All the time nervous energy pumped through him and he ended up taping a beat on the lab console as he waited for JARVIS to confirm his directions. Once JARVIS finished, Tony locked down the lab and headed straight back to the medical floor where he waited another five hours for word on Steve. Fury, Natasha, Clint, Bruce, even Maria Hill sat with him for a while. Thor was either out of town with Jane or on Asgard. Tony never could keep his schedule straight. 

Alvarez finally appeared with his surgical cap in his hand and rubbing vigorously at his eyes as he walked down the hallway to the waiting alcove. He smiled at them and said, “Captain Rogers is resting comfortably in the recovery room. We were able to place the 3D printed intramedullary nail in place to stabilize the leg so that the serum can do its magic. We did have a little bit of trouble-.” 

Tony stood up. “What kind of trouble?”

Alvarez scanned their faces and then his smile dropped. “The sedative only worked for about 45 minutes at a time. He would come out of it suddenly and painfully. We were able to time it after the second time, but it did slow things down and caused the Captain a considerable amount of pain. He’s resting now.”

“Can I see him?” Tony said. “He needs to see me. And, actually, I’m not asking, I’m telling. I’m going to see him now.” He walked past the doctor and ignored the rest of what Alvarez yelled after him. Instead he jogged to the recovery area and found a nurse lightly touching a damp cloth to Steve’s sweaty brow. 

The nurse almost protested but then she spotted Tony’s determined expression and she acquiesced to his unspoken request. She said quietly as she stepped aside, “He needs his rest.”

“Understood,” Tony said but his eyes never left Steve. 

The contraption braced over Steve’s leg looked like something out of a Medieval torture chamber. Bolts were screwed directly into his flesh, holding it in place. The rod that had been nailed into Steve’s bone was kept in place by multiple screws at the hip and knee. Unlike the normal nails, the ones implanted in Steve weren’t titanium. Instead they were biodegradable; otherwise the serum would reject them and cause more issues. Over the course of the next few weeks Steve’s body would degrade the rod as the serum healed the bone. 

“Steve,” Tony said, and Steve opened his eyes. He looked beat as if the mere thought of breathing caused him pain. Tony touched his cheek, the scraggly beard. “I can get this cleaned up for you. I brought a bag.” He suddenly could not remember where he dropped his bag with supplies for Steve. “Somewhere.” When Steve didn’t respond but laid his cheek against the palm of Tony’s hand, the fear from the last days ebbed away. “Steve, you’re going to be all right now. I’m here. She’s gone.”

Steve closed his eyes. 

“You’re in pain.”

“A little,” Steve said but his teeth clenched, and the sweat trickled down his temples. 

“You don’t have to hide from me. Steve, never again. Please,” Tony said, and he wanted to crawl into the bed with him. Yet the monitor wires and tubing prevented him. 

Steve grasped Tony’s hand against his face and held it there. “I know. I know. But I had to save you from her. I couldn’t.” He stopped and swallowed. “But you saw her. She had you. She spoke to you. She’ll be back. She’ll haunt you. I had to save you. I was so frightened that she would kill you.”

“No,” Tony said and clasped their hands together. “She’s gone. She’s dead now.”

Steve hissed in a breath and then sank against the pillows as the pain shuddered over him. Tony rubbed his arm and tried to lull him, easing the misery with touch and solace. 

“I have you, baby. We’re going to get through this, but you have to tell me. Everything. Everything you remember. I don’t want this to happen to you again, ever again,” Tony said, and Steve only nodded as the pain ratcheted up another notch. “Let me see what I can do for the pain. I’ll call the nurse.”

All the color drained out of Steve’s face, but he managed a slight smile in response. Luckily the nurse came, and she dosed Steve again – the medication took the edge off, but Tony knew it truly never touched the real pain. He’d have to get his medical research division to look into this sedative and see what they could come up with for Steve. As he sat down next to Steve’s bed, he noted the shield propped up against it. He frowned and stared at it. He’d left it in the cave. Where did it come from? How? He walked over to it. He bent down, and it felt like a beacon calling to him. He wondered if he was hallucinating. Touching it, he smiled. No. He wasn’t. Then he recalled that Clint had said something about SHIELD going back to the site. Well, at least they were good for something. Having the shield close, next to Steve, it soothed Tony somehow. He touched its cool metal again. They would be okay.

As the time went by, Tony split his daily routine between sitting with Steve (reading to him, playing the latest RPG on their tablets together, helping him through the agony of healing) and working through the data with JARVIS. By no means was the data complete. What Natasha gave him offered him only a glimpse of a larger world within SHIELD, a world interested in dangerous encounters in order to bring the technology or bio-information back to SHIELD. Of course, the idea of using it for defense played a role, but Tony knew enough about SHIELD, had seen them toy with the Tesseract and reinvent Hydra guns. 

He read through the analysis, spread it out in front of him – a cascade of blue holograms merging together to form a waterfall of information. He connected dots where he could, but he found more gaping holes than anything else. There was one theme overall: SHIELD feared what they had found. Feared that it would change their focus, their vision of the future. He even found some information on a project called Insight to stop threats before they became a danger. And didn’t that feel a little too Minority Report to him? 

He fell asleep at night but at Steve’s side sitting in a chair. He had dreams – images of ice caverns and a voice calling to him tormenting his nights. Startling awake, Tony muffled his horror at his memories of the tentacles swarming over him, touching him, invading him in the most intimate ways. He shuddered and shook off the feeling of violation. It was his fears for Steve that drove him every single damned day. 

When the stress and exhaustion hit him, Tony shifted his focus to helping Steve recover. The first few days were miserable. Steve sweated or vomited through the agony. Tony offered cool cloths for his face and held the bowl as he puked up whatever they’d given him to eat. The gastric food pump had been removed at Steve’s insistence. That was a blessing and curse because Steve hated it, but it provided the nutrients the serum desperately needed. Tony took to helping Steve eat, ladling the soups into spoons and offering it to him. Valiantly, Steve complied only to be sick again as the Hulk sedative wore off faster and faster. Luckily, by the fourth day though Steve might be weary, the pain decreased enough that he could eat – and eat he did. Tony laughed for the first time in weeks when he walked into Steve’s room to find him devouring a lasagna – not a portion but the whole dish of it. 

“You’re feeling better?” Tony asked as he plopped the bag of shaving supplies on the table next to the bed. 

Steve nodded and smiled. It felt good to see Steve more relaxed, more like his former self – and the stray thought that Steve might have a public persona as well hit Tony. Inwardly he crumpled. Steve’s vulnerability should be something that Tony knew about, that Tony cared about. Steve did not have to be Captain America to Tony all days and all the time. 

“But no, really? Are you okay?” Tony said and tilted his head as he studied Steve.

Steve dropped the fork and met Tony’s focus. “I feel better. Let’s leave it at that.”

Tony could have – and maybe before this whole nightmare began he would have taken it as a way out of the deeper inroads to their relationship. “I’d like to. Really I would.” Tony began to pull out the shaving supplies and place them on the table. “But you know, I kind of have this crush on this guy, who is pretty important to me and I want to make sure he’s more than just okay.”

Steve rubbed at the furrow at his brow. “I’m fine. I’m good. Look, I just ate a plate of lasagna, enough for a family of four with teenagers. I’m good.”

“Really?” Tony set down the straight edge razor. “So, if I talked about how SHIELD is scared shitless of this thing. That it even started a project to kill it called Insight – you’d have no problem with it?”

Steve lowered his gaze and stared at the rest of the food on the tray in front of him. He kept silent. The pain echoing through his stillness blasted Tony as if it was an explosion. 

“You don’t have to hide from me.” He clasped Steve’s hand. “Please. Never again. You don’t have to be Captain America in front of me.”

Steve raised his gaze and whispered, “If I’m not him, then who am I?”

Tony brought Steve’s hand to his lips and kissed the knuckles that had once been bruised and hurt but showed no signs of that hell on Earth anymore thanks to the serum. He whispered, “Don’t you know?”

Steve closed his eyes as if to ward off the words.

Tony lifted Steve’s chin. “You’re the man that I love.” He’d never ventured to say those words before. He hadn’t planned on it now. Maybe he wanted something more romantic, or that idyllic setting against a sunset and a tropical island somewhere, yet this moment felt real, solid, and perfect. 

Steve’s closed expression blossomed and opened, and he grabbed onto Tony, pulling him close and kissing him with such passion, such hunger that he stole the breath from Tony’s lungs. When they parted Tony heaved in air and shivered inwardly – terrified he might wake up to find this as his dream, instead of the nightmares that plagued him since his encounter with the monster. She was there, hovering over him, laughing at him. He closed it away, the fears and the feelings of her touch on his body.

“I love you, Tony,” Steve whispered, their foreheads touching. “I can’t lose you. Promise me I won’t lose you.”

“You won’t,” Tony said and embraced Steve even with the awkward angle. All he wanted was Steve in his arms. He’d ached for Steve to say those words to him for months. He’d wanted to say them to Steve for so long. Why did it have to be something drastic that brought the strength and courage to say them to his lips?

After, Tony shaved Steve. His hands were tender as he worked the straight edge razor over Steve’s jaw and cheeks. The food tray set aside, Tony concentrated on the task at hand, though the soft adoration in Steve’s eyes made him pause more than once. An envelope had been breached. Something had fundamentally changed in their relationship. But not only that, in Tony’s outlook, in his own wisdom of who he was. To know that Steve Rogers trusted him, wanted him, loved him, changed the world to Tony and changed his own core. It transformed everything. 

Thankfully, by the tenth day, the doctors announced that Steve was ready to leave the medical floor. Over the course of nearly a week, Steve’s demeanor strengthened, his features grew healthier, though he clung to Tony for support. The leg brace had been collapsed to two metal splints strapped around Steve’s leg. He couldn’t bend the leg at all. Not yet, the serum had done miracles with the healing so far, but the femur still had mending to do and the rod inserted inside of it would stay in place until it degraded naturally. When Tony arrived to take him home, Steve smiled, open and welcoming.

“Tony,” Steve said as the nurse assisted him in getting into the wheelchair. He beamed when he saw Tony and that only made the icy nightmares fade into the back of his consciousness. 

The nurse stepped aside and started to pack away the meager belongings that Steve had in the hospital room. Tony noted that Steve wore a simple t-shirt, and sweatpants though the one leg was completely cut off. “You look good today.” He leaned down and kissed Steve. “Are you ready to go?”

“If the doctor says I am, I need to get out of this place. Look at something else but these walls.” Steve quaked under Tony’s hand and he knew exactly where his mind went. The cave and the creature would follow them like a ghost for some time. 

“Well, I have the penthouse all set up for you. No problems. Lots of help. Pepper even promised to lay off with the R and D crap for a whi-.”

“Oh, I don’t want to be a problem, Tony. If she needs you, then-.”

It was Tony’s turned to jump in. “Nope, Pepper said you would say that, and she agrees. You need time to recover and you need your main squeeze to recover with.”

Steve colored and it was a joy to see him diverted and distracted with the little things in life that really meant the most. “Only if you’re not pulling my leg.”

“Well considering you only have one leg right now that’s functional, I would have to be a pretty big bastard to pull on it, wouldn’t I?” Tony teased, but Steve’s smile broke and he looked down at his partially healed leg. 

“I didn’t mean-.”

Tony knelt by Steve’s chair. They were both affected by that thing. Emotions ran close to the surface, close to the vein, and could so easily bleed. “Don’t, Steve. We have a long way to go, but we’re okay.”

Steve grasped his hand and nodded though the flagrancy of his high spirits dropped. Tony tried not to let it decrease his enthusiasm for having Steve released. Alvarez spoke to them for what felt like three hours but was probably more like thirty minutes. Steve was as antsy as Tony was to get out of the hospital wing of the Tower. Alvarez was going to go back to his practice and he left specific instructions for Steve and would be visiting for his appointments throughout the next month. 

Steve thanked him, but Tony witnessed the veneer cracking and hustled the doctor along before finally maneuvering the wheelchair into the elevator to go to the penthouse. As JARVIS brought them home, Tony said, “How about lunch?”

Steve shifted in his seat and grumbled but finally said, “In a bit?”

“Are you okay?” Tony asked as the doors to the elevator opened and he pushed the wheelchair out of it. 

“Yeah, I just want a minute to-.” He stopped and pointed across from the elevator to the observation deck. “Can we go out there. Just for a minute.”

“Hmm, sure?” Tony had installed a few ramps to accommodate the wheelchair. He wheeled the chair to the deck, the warmth of the late summer day heated the air, but the high breeze kept it from being stifling. “Is this okay?” He stopped the chair a broad distance from the railing.

“It’s good. I just wanted to feel a little of the heat,” Steve said and laid his head back. He closed his eyes and after a long quiet moment said, “I guess that SHIELD made up the story that I was frozen all those years.” He shook as if the ice still held him, as if the creature still haunted and tortured him. “I didn’t know. I thought the dreams – I thought I was going crazy. They told me that I was frozen. There was no creature. Until they had me come in and told me I had to capture it.”

Tony remained silent as he spoke.

As Steve closed his eyes and let the sun shine on his face he said, “SHIELD told me – they told me that they neutralized the threat. Now I don’t know what to believe. When I found out.” He opened his eyes and squinted, then looked at Tony. “When I found out that they hadn’t, it snowballed and I went after her, it. I knew they would push the team to do it and I couldn’t let anyone know.” He fisted his hands but still his whole body jerked as he quaked. “I couldn’t let you know. I didn’t want her near you. I wanted to save you from her. But I couldn’t.” The tears flowed down his face. 

Tony gently wiped away the tears and then kissed each eyelid, and then softly placed his lips on Steve’s forehead. “Steve, I’m fine. I’m right here.” The words felt empty, a vacuous thing without density or mass. He stood up straighter in the harsh sunlight. Placing his hand on Steve’s shoulder, he said, “We’ll get through this. We will.”

Tony barely believed his own words when he said them to Steve, but he pushed aside his doubts and his fears. Settling Steve into the penthouse with a routine became his one focus. He might have been extreme, but he needed Steve to feel safe, to feel hope, and to feel as if the past would not haunt him. 

It only took one night, three days after Steve moved back into the penthouse to throw Tony’s plans off. Tony was no stranger to nightmares. Hell, from the time he was a boy he had them. First, they had been about Howard and his drunken rages. Then they twisted and showed him the car accident that killed his parents, then turned to an Afghanistan cave – dark and alone until finally the expanse of space beckoned him. Now his nightmares transformed yet again, into that creature – calling him.

_‘No one really truly knows what lurks in the cold dark places of the Earth, now do they? Can they?’_

_He found himself in the cave again. The massive beak hovered over him as if it might swallow him at any moment. He tried to get away, but his legs failed him and he stumbled to the icy ground. It felt real – too real to him._

_‘Come play with me, my darling dear. If you pay the price I ask, I will only devour you.’_

_He wanted to speak, to retort, but no words would come out of his mouth, not a sound. He tried to scream as the tentacles slithered around him, as the voice in his head asked, ‘Are you as delightful, my darling?’_

_The tentacle pierced his mouth, pushed down his throat, and he gagged against it. Choking and coughing, begging for breath._

_‘Now you are mine.’_

A cry finally burst out of his mouth and he sat up in the bed, jogging it enough to wake Steve. He was propped up on pillows, his leg stabilized with molded cushions. Steve reached over to him, but Tony batted his hand away. The touch of the monster resonated from the dream. As reality materialized around him, Tony blinked awake and choked again only to have Steve try and comfort him. 

“Tony?” 

“’m sorry, sorry,” Tony said. Without any fanfare, Tony stumbled out of bed and headed to the bathroom.

“Tony?”

“’m all right. Just need a minute.” He gagged at the acrid taste in his mouth and put it down to bile. He staggered as if half drunk into the bathroom and partially closed the door. Clutching the sink, he stood there as wave after wave of nausea hit him. He spat up bile but nothing else. The memories of the dream assaulted him, the touch of her tentacles. How it filled his mouth, how it expanded his throat, how tight it felt inside of him. He gagged again and tried to puke but only dry heaves came over him. It felt so fucking real. Tears stung his eyes as he bent over the sink. Christ.

“Tony?” The door swung open and Steve stood there, wavering on one leg as he clung to the door frame. Sweat dotted his forehead. “Tony, what’s happening?”

“Just,” Tony said and grabbed the towel to wipe away the saliva on his lips. “Just a bad dream. You know, cave, Afghanistan, the whole nine yards.”

Steve stayed clamped to the door frame. “Come back to bed.”

Tony pressed the towel into his eyes until he saw stars; the thought of closing them and seeing that beast again terrified him. No wonder Steve had months of nightmares. “Jesus, you shouldn’t be up.” He tossed the towel onto the counter. “Why are you up?” He went to Steve’s side, ducked under his arm and helped him to walk to the bed. 

“I know what it’s like to have those nightmares. Feel all off balance, not like yourself.”

Tony managed to take on a significant portion of Steve’s weight so that he could get him back to bed without calling the night nurse. “You don’t have to worry about me. It’s something I’ve lived with for years. Don’t worry about it. We just have to worry about you.”

Steve sat down on the bed and then picked up his injured leg and placed it on the molded cushions. “Don’t do that. Don’t tell me not to worry about you. You’re important to me.”

“Not more important than getting healthy,” Tony said and fiddled with the blankets. 

“As important,” Steve said. “I can’t lose you.”

“Thinking that way is what got you into this situation. You can’t go it alone. You can’t face things like that creature alone. You need me. You need us. The team.”

Steve glared at him. “Rhodey told me that you went to the cave alone. That you left the team you brought with you behind to find me.”

Tony pulled the blanket up and over Steve’s legs. “This isn’t about me. This is about you. You going and follow SHIELD’s dubious orders to go and retrieve that thing. And then they didn’t even fucking go and get you.”

Steve looked away. “They told me that they wouldn’t. It was too dangerous. When they found me the first time, a dozen good agents died trying to get me from her.” 

“And you still went?” Tony knew he should cut his interrogation, that he should calm down, but the dream put him on edge. His nerves flared, and he wanted to lash out. Even as he recognized it, he failed to squash the need. “You went and never called us. You can’t do everything alone. When are you going to realize that?”

Steve raised his top lip and very nearly snarled at Tony as he said, “Sometimes one person has to make the sacrifice play, Tony. You know that. You did that over New York and you never asked anyone for permission. I don’t think I need permission to keep my team from a nightmare.”

“Right there, right there. That! That’s what I’m talking about. You think you know best for everyone, all the time. But did you ever think about what’s best for you?” Tony rushed through the words to stop Steve from denying it as well as to keep his own nerve up. 

“I could ask the same of you,” Steve spat back but then he leaned into the pillows and his hands balled up as the pain twisted his face.

“Christ, we shouldn’t be fighting,” Tony said and petted a hand down Steve’s face. “What can I do? Water? Ice?”

“No, no ice.” Steve clenched his teeth. “Water, just water.”

Getting a cup of water, Tony cursed himself. He was supposed to be taking care of Steve, not antagonizing him. Great boyfriend he was. He brought a cool cloth with him as well. By the time he got back to the bed though, Steve had fallen asleep. Rather than wake him to the pain, Tony set the supplies onto the side table and then slipped out of the bedroom. He found himself at the door to his lab. The images from his dream hunted him like he was a deer in the crosshairs of a rifleman. To get his mind off it, Tony focused on what JARVIS pulled up from the SHIELD data drive.

It confirmed a lot of what Tony already knew. When Tony scanned the information to identify exactly what SHIELD categorized as threatening, he discovered that the creature’s venom or spit (the scientists couldn’t decide on which it actually was) worked as a narcotic with strong evidence that the effects led to the victim falling prey to suggestion. The creature essentially could control its prey. And the kicker? It took one exposure. Captain America had been exposed for nearly seventy years to the venom, in various intimate ways. Tony cringed. The ability of the creature to control Steve didn’t register. Tony might refute some of the data, because he recalled those terrible moments when Steve woke up in the middle of the night begging for help. After seventy years did the creature break him?

No.

Tony refused to believe that at all. Steve had gone back to the creature, yes. For a while he doubted Steve’s mind, but he had to believe what SHIELD stated – Steve had wanted to go to end the creature (or bring it back for study). Steve still believed it, so Tony had to believe it, too. 

The data didn’t lie. At least that’s what Tony told himself. He studied the information and his eyes crossed with tiredness. He needed coffee. He needed a moment of relaxation. 

_’You could have rest. Bring my prize back.’_

_Tony stood there in the ice cave staring at the creature. Her girth put Jabba the Hut to shame. The tentacles wavered in the pale light. He wanted to say no, to deny her, but the words wouldn’t come._

_‘Give him to me and I’ll release you.’_

_He shook his head and then the screech from her beak blasted the air so loud and so long he felt blood leak from his ears. He moaned with the pain. The wail continued – a siren breaking the ice all around him into an avalanche of edges as sharp as knives. Something jetted out from one of the tentacles – a tongue like thing – and licked at the blood._

_‘My darling dear. Give him to me and you will be free.’_

“No!” Tony bolted upright from his slumped over position at the workbench. He covered his face with his hands. God, he really needed rest. He needed to put this whole nightmare behind him, behind them. He went to the bathroom connected to the workshop and turned on the cold water. Letting it run until it was frigid, he splashed some on his face. At first it was refreshing and startling but then it served only to boomerang him back to the cave and her icy voice in his head.

 _‘Bring him to me, my darling.’_.

Tony flashed his eyes open, gagged into the sink, and then gurgled as if he choked. He stumbled away from the running water and grabbed the towel. Covering his face, he stood there, breathing in and out. The echo of the creature’s voice faded, and all Tony could hear was the water running into the sink basin. He went over and turned it off. 

“God,” he whispered. This is what happened to him when he didn’t get enough rest. How many times had he awoken like this after the Afghanistan incident and more recently, the Chitauri invasion? He needed to get his brain under control. Get everything under control for Steve. Steve needed him.

When he made his way back to the main penthouse level, Tony found the morning nurse he’d hired administering to Steve. She placed a breakfast tray over his lap and smiled at Tony as he entered the room. “The captain asked for you.”

“Sorry, had some work to do,” he replied and smiled at Steve. He quickly made his way over to the bed. “Can we have a minute?”

The nurse, her name was Cathy, smiled in her grandmotherly way and said, “Just to remind you, Captain. I’ll be back to help you get ready for the doctor’s appointment.”

“Doctor’s appointment?” Tony asked. He was pretty sure he had all the appointments scheduled.

“I asked to see one of the therapists at SHIELD, Tony. Clint and Natasha recommended the guy. I hope he’s good,” Steve said. Though he sounded confident, he looked like a fish with a hook stuck in its mouth.

“Thank you, Cathy,” Tony said as she left and then went back to Steve. Tony kissed him on the temple as he started to slowly eat. “When did you schedule that?” Something rankled about Steve doing it without informing him.

“Yesterday before you arrived to pick me up. I called Natasha and she arranged it,” Steve said. He played with the food more than ate it. “I realized you’re right. All of you are right. I need to get my head on straight about this thing. How she kept me. I thought I’d gone crazy with those dreams, but they were memories all this time. I need to talk to someone about it.” His words petered out as if he was an engine just barely chugging along.

Tony should have been happy to hear that Steve took the initiative. That he wanted to do something to stop the madness, but he wasn’t. “You should have told me.”

“What?” Steve frowned, then he shrugged. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to get it started before I lost my nerve.” He pushed the eggs around on the plate. “Speaking of which, do you have time? I don’t think I can do this on my own. I’d like to have someone there, to be there for me?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure. Sorry. I just want to do what’s best for you,” Tony said and stroked a hand through Steve’s hair. Why did he feel like what he said was a lie? “Really, I want what is best for you.”

Steve glanced up at Tony and smiled. “I know. I just have to try and do what’s best for me, too.”

“Well, what if we got someone not SHIELD?” Tony asked. He settled at the foot of the bed, trying not to upset the tray. “I mean, SHIELD sent you back there, so they might not be the best place to go for help.”

“I know, I just need-.” He stopped and looked away – Tony knew he was remembering as the color drained out of his face. “I remember she would feed me.” His words were low, halting, and troubling. “All those years.” He swallowed and closed his eyes even as the tears leaked through to stain his eyelashes. He placed his hand on his abdomen. “She’s there. Always.”

Tony hadn’t thought of how Steve survived at all. SHIELD had told them that he’d been in stasis in the ice, but that wasn’t true. Steve had been prisoner of that thing for all these years and now it was dead and still the memories tortured Steve. 

“I’ll get someone over here. I know someone.”

“Do you think they can, well, can they come today?” Steve inhaled a tremulous breath. “I don’t think I can do it if I don’t do it now.”

“Okay, I’ll see what I can do.”

It turned out that it was incredibly hard to get a therapist to see someone on a moment’s notice even with Tony’s considerable resources. Of course, they could call on emergency lines but that didn’t seem like the right course of action. While Steve wanted to see the SHIELD psychiatrist, Tony stayed dead set against anyone from SHIELD, other than the Avengers getting close to Steve again. He laid it on the line and Steve reluctantly agreed. Steve hadn’t eaten much of his breakfast and went back to sleep almost immediately after they argued about the therapist arrangements. The morning nurse took the tray away and mentioned the SHIELD therapist again.

“I know the therapist. She’s a good woman.”

“I don’t care,” Tony snapped. “SHIELD isn’t coming close to him again. Not for a long time. And make sure Fury and Hill have no access as well.” He would order JARVIS to shut down any interaction with Fury and Hill as well. 

The nurse only nodded and hurried away with the nearly untouched breakfast tray. As Tony watched her, doubts sprang up like weeds in his head. The weeds choked him. He grimaced. He was doing the right thing. He needed to keep Steve away from SHIELD. Sure, they identified the threat, but how did they manage it? By sending Steve right back into that monster’s lair. That’s not the way to do business. Not at all. 

It took two days to fly the therapist in that Tony wanted to talk to Steve. It wasn’t ideal. Because the therapist was based in Canada, Steve wouldn’t be able to see him on a routine basis. Telemedicine, though, happened to be one of Stark Industries newest ventures. So, Tony hoped it would be sufficient. 

When Professor Xavier arrived, Tony met him in the main lounge of the penthouse. “I’m honored to have you here, Professor.” Tony had read about his school for the gifted and had donated funds to the endeavor. 

“I’m not sure why I have been asked to come, Mister Stark.” He narrowed his eyes at Tony. “I’m not sure you know why either.”

“I need someone I can trust to help a friend.”

“And why would you trust me?” Xavier asked. “Mister Stark, I think your motivations are questionable. I only came because I have other business in the city.”

Tony held up his hands. “Since you’re here already, and I do send an awful lot of funds to your school, do you think you could at least check him out?”

“Captain Rogers?” Xavier asked. He still hesitated.

Tony hadn’t wanted to pull this card out of his pocket, but JARVIS gave him the ammunition he needed. He pulled out his phone and activated the holographic photo of a man. “Tell me this man didn’t fight in World War II and also happens to be hanging around your school. Looking like he never aged at all.”

Xavier gazed at the holographic representation of someone named Logan according to JARVIS. Xavier considered Tony and then the holograph. “I’m not sure why you think threatening me would lead to anything-.”

“I also know that some of your kids, those gifted ones, aren’t exactly academically gifted.” Tony waited. “I just need you to talk to him. I don’t want to blow your cover, but I can tell you that SHIELD and people like them are always searching for people like you. To exploit. Please, he needs your help.”

Xavier shook his head. “If you think you can bargain or threaten, then you are wrong. But if you are sincerely trying to help Captain Rogers, then I will offer to talk to him once. After that, I am afraid I will have to leave your company.”

Tony sighed. “Deal.”

Xavier drove the wheelchair toward the backrooms of the penthouse, where Tony directed him. In a wheelchair of his own, Steve sat in the sitting area of the bedroom. He looked up from his book as the professor entered. “Tony?” 

“This is Professor Xavier. He’s here to help you.” Tony introduced. “Steve Rogers, Charles Xavier.”

Steve reached out and offered his hand. Xavier took it, held on a little too long, and then released him. Xavier gave a leery glance at Tony and then turned back to Steve. 

“You’re a therapist?” Steve asked.

“Not exactly. He has other special talents. He runs a school in Canada for the gifted and he’s known for his ability to help people.” Tony left it at that. The critical look Steve threw at Tony felt as if Captain America was disapproving his choices. Tony only sighed. “Give him a chance.”

“I’d rather have a real therapist, Tony. I’m sorry Professor for wasting your time,” Steve said and started to angle the chair out of the sitting area. His book slipped off his lap and he stopped, exhaustion marring his features.

“If you’ll allow me, perhaps I can help?” Xavier said. 

Steve stopped. “I don’t see how a professor of some school for gifted kids can help me.”

“Steve, let him try.” Tony said and crossed his arms. He stood like a stone, like that could force Steve to listen to reason.

Steve settled and waved at Xavier. “Give it your best shot.”

Xavier maneuvered his own chair in front of Steve’s with much more skill and adeptness than Steve demonstrated. “Let’s start with the chair. It’s new for you.”

Steve glared at Tony but then acknowledged the professor. “Yes, I was in a plane crash.”

“And you encountered something – something that you dreaded for a long time?” Xavier said, and Tony shifted in his stance, observing the professor.

“Tony, are you sure?”

“The professor will keep your secrets, right?”

Xavier nodded. “I am here to help you. I am not the kind to spread rumors and share your secrets, Captain.”

Steve seemed to weigh the two of them. Tony willed Steve to try, because he hated the idea of having SHIELD insinuate itself back into Steve’s life again. If that happened, Tony couldn’t assure Steve’s safety. After a moment’s pause, Steve said, “Okay.” He shifted slightly only cringing from the awkward movement of his immobilized leg. Tony rushed to his side and helped him get more comfortable. As he did, Steve spoke, “I was captured for a while. It was like nothing I had experienced before.” 

Tony went still as Steve spoke.

“My captor, she enticed. She spoke to me as if she knew who I was, as if every breath I took was important to her. She told me she loved me,” Steve whispered. His head bowed as he related his story. “She became everything to me. She fed me. Parts of -.” He stopped and covered his eyes. 

“Captain,” Xavier said. “If you would be willing, I am able to access your mind directly.”

“What?” Steve flinched. “No. No. That’s what she did. No.” Steve gave a great heave on the wheels of the chair and even though the brake was on the mechanism clattered off. “No, no one is going into my head again. She did that.” He spun around and growled at Tony. “How could you? How could you?”

He grappled with the chair but managed to get it moving and out of the sitting area of the master bedroom. Tony heard the chair motor down the hallway. Xavier broke his attention.

“I think you have more to deal with than I can help you with, Mister Stark.”

“You got that right,” Tony muttered. The idea that Steve didn’t trust him rose up like a viper. “Sorry for wasting your time. JARVIS, show the professor out.” Tony went after Steve, knowing that JARVIS would ensure that Xavier vacated the premises. It took a bit to find Steve, but in the end he was on his own floor in the middle of his living room. 

“Steve,” Tony said as he entered, having JARVIS open the lock.

“So, I guess that was a lie that you gave us all personal floors and that we had control over them and not JARVIS,” Steve said. Perspiration shined on his forehead. His eyes were tired again. 

“I wanted to help.”

“You stopped me from getting help, Tony,” Steve lashed back. “I don’t care that you think all of SHIELD is a threat. I asked Clint, I asked Natasha, or don’t you trust them anymore.”

Tony stayed silent.

“Tony,” Steve said, aghast. “You have to trust your team.”

Tony shook his head, the rage and fear unbridled and brilliantly wild through his nerves. “No, you don’t know. They wanted to give up on you. They wanted to say you were dead. I’m the one who went after you. I did. I can’t trust them because they don’t deserve to be trusted.”

“Tony,” Steve said. The paleness of his skin and the sheen of sweat accentuated his depleted figure. “Tony, you have to trust someone. Please. I don’t want the professor. You don’t know what she did.”

Tony went to his side, sitting down on the couch next to him. He reached out and clasped Steve’s hands. “Then tell me. I’m here for you. I swear once I find someone trustworthy enough, I’ll get them to help you. But tell me.”

“I don-.”

He squeezed Steve’s hands. “Please.”

Steve glanced down and then after a long moment, looked back up at Tony. “Now I know all the dreams were real. Now the memories are real. I lived for decades with her. She fed off the serum. She had this proboscis, tube like thing that wasn’t one of her tentacles. It would.” He retched. “It would slide down my throat.” He retched again, and Tony raced to the kitchen, retrieved a bowl and a towel. 

“It’s okay,” Tony said and placed the bowl on his lap. 

“She would feed me with it as she took the serum. It would gush this vile tasting ink down my throat. I don’t know what it was. But it kept me alive. I wished-.” He gagged. “I wished for death. I tried so hard to stop her. To fight her. But she was too strong. She used me.” He stopped and retched, but this time he vomited what little he’d been able to eat this morning into the bowl. 

“Oh Christ,” Tony said and shivered as he recalled the memories of the cave, the ice, the slithering tentacles around him. The call of her voice in his head resounded again. 

“I can’t go back,” Steve said. “Don’t make me go back. I tried to, I did. I went back to try and do the right thing. I always try and do the right thing. But this time I can’t. Don’t make me.”

Tony gripped Steve’s face in his hands. “You’re not going back, baby. Never. I’m here. She’s gone – she’s dead.”

Steve stiffened. “I don’t like this. I don’t. This isn’t me. I’ve always been able to stand up, to fight.” He balled his fists and clenched his teeth. 

“We can handle this. I know we can,” Tony said and then stood up. He needed to clear the air, get Steve thinking and doing stuff that would make him feel normal and sane. “About we go down to the workshop? I think it’s time for an upgrade to your uniform. Something different, something to take your mind off of things?”

It took a while and some nudging, but Steve finally agreed. The day went well, except for a few times that Steve stared absently into space and Tony had to bring him back with a knock to the arm. Steve managed to eat a decent dinner and hold it down. When the night nurse helped Steve get dressed into bed Tony scored it a victory. 

In bed with the lights down low, Steve whispered to Tony, “You don’t have to stay here with me. I know it’s still early for you. For the serum to work, I know I need more sleep right now.”

“It’s okay.” Tony picked up his tablet. “I can always read or something.”

“I just don’t want to disturb you,” Steve said. 

After quietness dropped over them, Tony asked, “How much of it do you remember?” 

The bed moved as Steve shuddered. “All of it.” He paused and wrapped his arms around himself as he said, “Now that it’s all come back, it’s so clear.”

“How do you hold it together?” It was a miracle that after all that he’d gone through, Steve had actually been able to act normally. The veneer might be stained and a little nicked now, but the fact remained that his skills at compartmentalizing his own pain were categorized as super human at the very least. 

Into the darkness surrounding them, Steve said, “Just like you do, I suppose. It might have been nearly seventy years but a lot of it was just pain. For a while I didn’t think I was a person anymore. I thought I was just pain.”

“God,” Tony said and the horror swimming in the back of his head, that memory of her voice haunted him. “But she fed you?” 

“Kept me alive is more like it. It wasn’t a symbiotic relationship. I was wounded when the Valkyrie went down. She was able to keep me weak and pliant because of it. I tried to fight, but I never got strong enough.” He stopped. “I can’t talk about this right now. I want to sleep, and I don’t want to dream about her.”

Tony understood. “Okay, just close your eyes. I’ll be here.”

“Thanks, Tony.” 

In only minutes, Tony felt the rise and fall of Steve’s deep breathing as sleep settled over him. He hoped to all the angels that Steve wouldn’t dream. He feared what Steve would remember, what he could recall. Tony had seen Steve as a prisoner of that thing. He’d seen the tentacles wrapped around and into living flesh. He’d seen the results and how hideous it was.

_‘Never. It was never hideous.’_

_Tony shivered at the sound of her voice. He tried to wake himself up._

_‘He came to me. Injured, dying. I did what I could to help him. He serviced me in return. He must return to me.’_

_‘That’s not happening,’ Tony said to the dream. He felt around and only felt the bed, not the icy cave floor._

_‘He owes me a debt. I saved his life twice.’_

_‘You nearly killed him twice!’ Tony yelled back into the abyss around him. He tried to find Steve, to find an anchor in the blackness that engulfed him, but he touched nothing._

_‘He would be safe with me. Safe and sound. No one to hurt him, ever.’_

_‘That’s not true.’_

_‘If you don’t bring him to me, he will suffer. He will die. He needs me. You need me. Tell me you need me, my darling.’_

_The nothingness transformed around him into the beast, the long tentacles slipped up his leg and encircled his waist. It teased at his ass and then the proboscis played with his lips._

_‘Open, my darling, and taste me.’_

_The monster crawled over his now naked body and he couldn’t move, even if he wanted to, but he found something inside of him ached to allow her, to be with her. He opened his mouth and her long proboscis slid inside and down his throat._

_‘Taste me. Come home to me. Bring him, my darling… Bring him.’_

Tony jarred awake and slapped his face as the sickeningly sweet taste of the creature lingered in his mouth. “JARVIS, lights – full.”

Bright lights flashed on and Steve groaned and threw an arm over his face. Nothing untoward was in the room. No one was there. The creature was dead. It lived only in his dreams and he kept giving it power.

“Tony?” Steve said and dropped his arm. His eyes looked bleary and watered. 

“It’s okay. I just need to get up,” he said. “Made a mistake. JARVIS dim lights to-.”

“Twenty percent light,” Steve added. “I don’t want to be in the dark.”

“I’m going to call the night nurse in to sit with you. I need to do a little work.” He picked up his tablet and showed it to Steve. “Will you be okay?”

“Yeah,” Steve said already yawning. 

“Sleep well,” Tony said and kissed Steve quickly on the mouth. He left the room after paging the night nurse. She arrived and sat to the side at the ready to care for Steve. Tony paused to gaze at him as he started to drift back to sleep. He gripped the tablet as if it held him to reality, as if it were his tether. He nodded once to the nurse and then escaped to his workshop. 

He spent the next thirty-six hours there. He made excuses to himself that the nurses would take care of Steve, that he needed to get some work done for the company, that the Avengers needed him to review their equipment. He kept up the line of thought until Bruce knocked on the glass doors to the workshop and entered. 

“Hey.”

Tony flipped up his welding mask. “Hey yourself.” He blinked a few times. His eyes ached from lack of proper sleep. 

“Steve’s been asking for you. I talked with him a little today. We kind of talked about meditation as a means to help him through the memories,” Bruce said. “But I really think he needs to talk to a therapist.”

Tony dropped the welding torch and tore off the mask. “You didn’t get him back on that stint again, did you? I don’t want him around SHIELD. I don’t want SHIELD to be anywhere near this place. They nearly got him killed and didn’t bring us into the mission. They gave up on him!”

The word mission rang hollow in his head. He recalled missions that worked perfectly, where they were all in sync. But now they were out of sync, so out of sync. If they stayed this way, Steve would get hurt. No. Steve was his. He didn’t want Steve hurt. He wanted Steve safe.

Bruce raised his hands. “Hey, it’s me. I’m not advocating SHIELD. I’m just saying he needs more than me to talk to.”

“He’s got me.” 

“That’s not enough, Tony. He needs professional help. You are not it,” Bruce said. “He was tortured for seventy years. It’s amazing that he’s resilient enough to survive and talk and be Captain America-.”

“And it shows how strong he is! Don’t you think I know that? I am trying to show him that he can do this. I know he can,” Tony said. “Me more than anyone else in this damned century knows him.”

“Tony, you’re not doing him any favors by not getting him help.” Bruce’s expression fell. “You need to help him.”

“I’m helping him stay safe. He needs to be safe. You’re right. We’re a chemical reaction-.” Tony started.

“What are you talking about? The team works fine. We all know our strengths and our weaknesses. We balance pretty well, I think.” Bruce clenched his hands into fists as if warding off the Hulk.

“No,” Tony said. “We don’t. Steve wouldn’t have gotten hurt if someone had listened to me.”

“Me is not a team, Tony.” Bruce opened his hands and shook his head. “I can’t be here to watch this if you’re going to play with his mental health.”

Tony steadied himself. No one – not Bruce, not Natasha, not Clint, or even Rhodey – knew exactly what he had seen and experienced in that cave. Of all the people in the world, the one person that comprehended even a little of what Steve had gone through was him. No one else. How could anyone relate to it at all?

Still, Tony relented, “Listen, let’s just let him rest for a few more days. A week. Maybe once his leg starts healing more, then he can tackle his mental state. I can’t see him doing both right now. He’s too fragile.”

“Fragile, yes, but he needs help.”.”

“I’ve seen him in the dark, Bruce. He’s talked to me about it. He’s starting to open up when before he always denied everything, said it was simply a bad dream,” Tony said. He fiddled with the welding mask. “The barricades are falling. He’s letting me in.”

“Don’t let your need to be helpful – to save him - cause him more pain,” Bruce warned. “But a week is a good idea. Let the leg heal up a little more and then get him to the right doctor.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony agreed. Bruce hung around a little longer until Tony promised to go and see Steve. Once he left, Tony sank onto the couch where Steve often sat earlier in their relationship as they flirted and played the game with one another until they’d finally found themselves in each other’s arms. 

How the hell could he possibly keep Steve safe? If he could he would build a shield around Steve. 

_‘Come, my darling, I will keep him safe. I will keep you both safe. Come to me.’_

_A chilled wind brushed over him and the workshop around him faded into darkness. He searched around and felt only the coldness encompassing him. A frigid mist enveloped what little light there was._

_‘Don’t you want him to be safe? Don’t you want to be safe?’_

_‘No, you’re not safety.’_

_‘Are you so sure? He survived for all that time because of me. I saved him. Bring him back to me.’_

_‘No,’ Tony whispered but his muscles tensed, and his heart froze. His lungs crackled with ice. His flesh hardened until it transformed into ice and his breath crystallized to frost._

_‘Death will take him. Death will take you if you don’t come home, my darling. Come back to me.’_

He forced himself to fall forward and he crashed to the floor in his workshop. His body quaked with the cold. He grunted. “What the fuck?” He made it into the bathroom and washed up. He hated that this seemed to become a routine. Have a bad dream, wash up, walk it off. He needed coffee and something substantial to eat.

When he arrived at the penthouse level, Tony discovered Steve in the lounge area with his leg propped up on a hassock and an uncomfortable number of books and papers spread out before him. The television was tuned to a new station. Tony glanced at the screen, saw nothing of importance, and then back at the mess surrounding Steve.

“What’s all this?” Tony asked as he pointed to the piles.

“Thought I would put myself to use. Nat and Clint are going on a mission and I decided I’d do some of the background review for them.” Steve picked up a folder stuffed with papers, but before he could open it, Tony swiped it.

“Nope, nope, nope. I told you this is time for you to rest. Doing this -this is not relaxing.” Steve stretched to reach for the file, but Tony whipped it away and tossed it onto the bar. “No. You’re supposed to be resting.”

“I can only rest so much. I need to do something else other than think. I need to-.” Steve frowned and scratched at the back of his neck.

“Get distracted,” Tony said. “I get it, but can we try and do something less-. Well, less stress inducing?”

“I don’t find work stress inducing,” Steve said and peered up over his shoulder at Tony. “Just like you.” He twisted up his mouth. “Where have you been? You look like someone ran over your dog.”

Tony rubbed at his beard. “Probably need a shave.”

“You look like you need to sleep more than I do,” Steve said and reached back to bring Tony closer. “I haven’t seen you in nearly two days!”

Accepting the hand, Tony squeezed it and plopped onto the couch next to Steve. “This whole thing, let’s just say it’s thrown me.” He threaded his fingers through Steve’s and clasped his hand tightly. “I just want you to be safe. The idea that you suffered for so long.”

Steve raised his other hand and placed it over Tony’s lips. “I’m safe. I’m here with you.”

“I saw the nightmares, Steve,” Tony said. “I watched as they tore you apart.” It tore Tony apart as well. He should have gotten Steve help and now, now he was determined to help. But maybe Bruce was right. 

“I don’t know why, but the nightmares are gone. Maybe knowing that it was real helped in some way? Maybe, I’m just too exhausted to dream?” Steve said. “Or maybe you’re right.”

“I’m right?” Tony asked.

“That she’s dead,” Steve said. “I always thought the dreams were her, you know, calling me back. She wormed her way into my head and now, now there’s this empty place where she was all those years.” A slight tremor quaked through him. “You saved me, and I feel free now.”

Tony leaned in and kissed Steve. Maybe he was using it to distract Steve, or even himself, from the truth. The nightmares stayed with them, only Tony had traded places with Steve. He wouldn’t let it change anything. If this became Tony’s burden to bear, he would do it – hell, he had years of experience with nightmares. It would change nothing. Except it would be the first step in Steve healing.

“I’m glad,” Tony said as he pulled away. 

Nothing got past Steve. “You’re tired, Tony. What’s wrong?”

His attempt at a smile failed. “I’m just worried about you, about your leg. About how you’re adjusting to all of us knowing what happened to you.” 

“It’s a relief in some ways,” Steve replied. “I don’t want to relive it, but now that the team knows, it’s easier for me.”

“They don’t all know you were aware,” Tony said and the idea of it terrified him. Seventy years how did he not lose himself completely? Tony felt like he was teetering on the brink as he balanced helping Steve recover, getting through the memories of the creature’s attack, and just every day shit. He needed some of Steve’s resolve.

“No, they don’t.” Steve shifted and reached for the wheelchair that was placed to the side of the couch. Tony helped him. Getting Steve into the chair was always an issue. Steve had to keep his injured leg stable as Tony steadied his other leg. He got the broken one in the brace on the chair. After he finished, Steve said, “They don’t need to know. No one else needs to know, Tony. I’m not some fish in a bowl that people need to study to see how I managed it.”

That struck Tony. Maybe Bruce was wrong. Maybe bringing in another person to pry apart Steve’s walls might just crack his foundation and destroy who Steve was. He built walls to contain the hell, so who was Tony to force the issue now? 

“Then we’ll figure out how to do this together,” Tony said. 

The progress Steve made over the next few days astounded Tony, though it shouldn’t have. Considering the fact that Steve survived a horrendous lifetime of hell with the creature, the idea that his leg might slow him down was ludicrous. Every now and then Steve would stop what he was doing and confess another nightmare about his time with the creature. The one thing that destroyed him and he kept going back to was the invasion of his body by the monster. 

One afternoon as they sat on the observation deck eating lunch, Steve had broached the subject again. “After thinking about it again, I think I need to talk to someone about it, Tony. I don’t want to upset you. To change how you look at me when I talk about what she did.”

“You can’t change how I look at you. What she did doesn’t reflect on you. It never did before I knew, and it doesn’t now,” Tony said. 

“She fed me with her mouth thing, I think it’s called aproboscis. It would fill up me up with her ink or whatever the hell it was.” He clenched his teeth together. “Do you know how many times I nearly vomited when we kissed? I couldn’t handle it.”

Tony dropped his sandwich. “You never said.” The idea that he caused more harm to Steve hurt. His mind did a loop and he grabbed onto a line, something to help him find salvation. “But she helped you, didn’t she?”

Steve halted chewing and blinked several times before he swallowed. “What?”

“You were injured, right?” Tony said. He saw the panic in Steve’s eyes. “No, before you think I’m nuts just listen to me. She helped you in some ways. You probably would have died when the Valkyrie crashed, but she kept you safe, warm, and fed. Sure it was for her own self-interests, but she did save you, and for that, I’m thankful.”

“Tony.” Steve’s color drained and he fought to keep the tears from falling. “I don’t know why you would say that.”

Tony grasped Steve’s hand. “Wouldn’t it make things better if you looked at the situation in a more positive light?” 

“She used me,” Steve said and cringed. “She abused me for decades. Until I thought I was nothing else but a raw emotion. Pain. I thought of myself as pain. I had no concept of myself at all. When the SHIELD doctors woke me, saved me, I didn’t know what the hell was going on. For the longest time I thought she was a nightmare, that the story they told everyone – that I was frozen – was true. It had to be true otherwise I’d have to come to terms with the idea that I thought of myself as an abstract _thing_! I thought it was all a dream, a nightmare until they found her again. She lived after they rescued me.”

“But don’t you see,” Tony said and every fiber in his being yearned to show Steve how earnest and true he was. “You can forget all of what she did. Just focus on the positive.”

“God, Tony, I can’t believe that. You can’t. There is no positive here. I would have rather die than be beholden to her.” Steve struggled to sit up, to _stand_ up, to get away from him, but Tony captured his arm and kept him from lurching upward and hurting himself.

“No, Steve, I’m not saying she’s a hero. Or that you should be happy about what happened. I’m just trying to help. Maybe not in the right way, I don’t know, but you said it yourself that you didn’t even know that she was real, that you thought you had nightmares until SHIELD confessed it all happened,” Tony said. He clung to Steve’s hand. He couldn’t lose him, and he couldn’t lose this point. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t think this way, but I want you to find a way to forget it, to feel free. Look for the silver lining, you know?”

Steve scrubbed his hands through his hair and tugged away from Tony as he did so. “I know you’re trying to help. Or at least, I hope that’s what you’re doing.” He leaned forward to get his chair. “But I think I need to be alone for a while.”

“Steve,” Tony said, but even as he flailed helplessly for words to explain, Steve only shook his head. 

“Please just give me time.” His whole demeanor closed off. Tony clamped his mouth shut. Before he could offer to help any further, Steve waved off Tony. “I’ll see you for dinner?”

With a nod, Tony let Steve leave the lounge. He stood there staring at the discarded lunch. He’d only wanted to help. He wanted to show Steve how to spin things a little differently. He spent years working the media to see things positively even when the news might tilt toward the negative. It was the right thing to do, he was sure. When he stripped away the horror, he saw that the creature had healed Steve. The idea that Steve wouldn’t have survived without the creature terrified him. He needed Steve, and that monster, regardless of intention, saved him, saved Tony’s boyfriend. 

_‘Yes, yes I did.’_

Tony pressed fingers to his temples. She had saved Steve from death and that’s what Tony focused on, only that small fact. 

_‘And now he must come back to save me.’_

Tony quivered and then set about collecting the plates and scraping the dishes to pile them on the table. He wasn’t going to fall into the trap of doubting himself. He did the right thing. Steve needed a think of things in a positive light. Otherwise he might never get out of the darkness. Tony had been a victim of his own mind for too long to allow someone he loved to fall into that trap. 

Throughout the next few days, Steve remained reticent. He answered Tony, asked for help when needed, but generally kept to himself. At two weeks post-surgery, the doctors decided it was time for Steve to start his physical therapy. Tony hesitated. He thought they might be rushing things considering that Steve was Captain America and they all expected too much of him all the time.

While the day nurse helped Steve get into his sweats, Tony stood to the side. He yawned, and his eyes burned. He longed for dreamless nights. Attending to Steve, he asked, “Do you think this is a good idea?” 

“What?” Steve thanked the nurse then and she left the bedroom. The doctors had removed the pins and outside braces from Steve’s leg the previous day. His leg looked like a molten mess of bruises at different stages of healing. Colors of blue, black, red, purple, green, and yellow covered his thigh. “The doctor said it was time.”

“The doctor just removed the outer braces.”

“Well, I have to get back to it, don’t I?” Steve said and pulled the crutches to him. 

Tony stepped up close to Steve. “I know you’re still a little angry with me. I understand that. I was just trying to make things easier for you to deal with. Seventy years of it has to be hard to fathom, especially since you thought it was all part of your nightmares for such a long time.”

Steve lowered his gaze, staring instead at the crutches in his lap. “I just don’t want to color things all rosy when they’re not.”

“I get that, and I appreciate it. But this is nuts. You need to slow down. Everyone thinks that just because you’re Captain America that you can do it, get back up, fight the good fight. Well, once in a while, it might be good if you just stayed down. It’s not anything to be ashamed of.”

“I’m not ashamed of it, Tony. I spent the better part of my life sick. I know how this feels. I don’t like it, at all. But I know how to handle it.” Steve twisted his hands around the metal shaft of the crutches. “Yeah, the whole idea that the nightmares were real, that I thought was just raw pain for so long, it bothers me. A lot. I can’t even tell you how much. Dealing with it alone isn’t helping.”

He hated the idea of it, but Tony admitted he was still oscillating back and forth about outside help. “I can get you someone. I could call Professor Xavier again,” Tony said.

“No, I don’t want anyone in my head. She was in my head for so long,” Steve said. “I’m scared she’ll come back. Lure me back.”

“Okay, how about Bruce?” Tony said. “I know he says he’s not that kind of doctor, but he knows meditation techniques, all that kind of stuff. Maybe he can help more? Didn’t he talk to you about meditation?”

“Why can’t I just-.”

Tony went to his knees in front of Steve, grabbing his hands. “We can’t trust them. How can we trust them when even the regular doctors are pushing you because you’re Captain America? They lied to you, told you were in ice all those years, and brushed off your memories as nightmares. We can’t trust them.”

Steve ran his hand down the side of Tony’s face. “Tony, we have to trust someone.”

“Not with this. Promise me that you’ll talk with Bruce.”

“Okay, okay,” Steve said after a long pause. “I’ll talk to him. Maybe he can give me some pointers.” Steve looked doubtful and the truth was, Tony knew Steve needed more – he needed someone to discuss being a prisoner for so long, to guide him through the stages of grief for a life lost. Steve tenderly touched Tony’s face. “You look exhausted. Did I do this? Are you so worried about me that I did this to you?”

Tony cupped Steve’s hand against his cheek. “It’s okay. It’s been a while. You’re not yourself.”

“No,” Steve said. “I’m not. I apologize for that.” He looked away. “I’m not sure who I am anymore.”

“Well, can you let me make some of the decisions then? I know it’s hard with that Captain America persona following you everywhere. You think you need to do things a certain way and don’t give yourself any time.” He dropped his hands and grasped the crutches. “Like today. You’re not ready for this yet. How about you give yourself a little more time.”

“But the physical therapist is waiting for me on the Training Floor.” 

“I’ll have JARVIS deal with it. Don’t worry.” Tony gently tugged the crutches and put them in the closet. “You just need to rest.”

He got Steve back into the bed and tucked the crutches to the side. Steve watched him silently and then Tony crawled back over to the bed. “You need to relax, baby.” He glanced up over the bed. Hanging on the wall behind the bed was the shield. How it got there, Tony couldn’t fathom. It hung like a beacon over them. Even now, when Steve needed to rest, that shield waited for them. 

“I just laid in bed for so long, I don’t -.” 

He stopped as Tony slid a hand down his flank and then played with the waistband of his sweatpants. “I can find other ways to get you to relax.” 

“Tony, I-.” He swallowed down his words as Tony slipped his hand down the front of Steve’s pants. He caressed along Steve’s cock until he felt it stiffen. 

“How about I help you relax,” Tony whispered and then managed to pull the pants down along with Steve’s boxers. He was only half hard but that was enough of an invitation to Tony. Steve always responded so quickly to touch. As Tony kneeled on the bed, he bent down and lapped at the tip of Steve’s cock. 

Steve made a small cry and shivered. Tony peered up at him, smiled and then licked, long and slow up the length of his cock. Steve quaked and hardened further. 

“Do you? Do you think we should?” Steve asked, the tenor of his voice betraying his uncertainty. 

“Oh, yes, I think we absolutely should,” Tony said and licked again, tasting Steve as if it was the first time. The salt enticed and Tony encircled Steve with his mouth, and then gulped him down, deep throating him almost instantly.

Steve gasped out and clawed at the sheets. “Oh, Tony.”

Tony winked at him but continued moving his tongue in small motions along the ridge of Steve’s main blood vessel. He grew harder still and jerked his hips slightly. A thought crossed his mind that it might not be a great idea for Steve to be thrusting so Tony used one hand to press down on his hips, keeping him still as he began a bobbing motion with his mouth.

Steve struggled a bit, trying to push up and jerk into Tony’s mouth, but Tony pushed him to stillness and dragged in air as he rocked onto his hard cock. A dribble of come splashed into his mouth and Tony drank it down, the bitterness an elixir to his tongue. He forced a hand down his own pants and jerked himself, dry and aching as he rhythmically matched his pace around Steve’s cock. 

Groaning sent Steve into new heights as Tony renewed his efforts. As he swallowed and let the undulations of his throat clench around Steve, he also worked himself. The dryness of his hand hurt, but he wanted it, he wanted it dry and painful. Steve couldn’t stop himself and with only one hand on him, Tony failed to stop the hard thrust from him. Steve fucked into Tony’s mouth and the sheer power of it sent chills of pleasure through him, he fucked his hand and felt the warmth of his come and then stroked faster as his mouth sucked and followed Steve’s lead. 

In a great gush Tony came over his hand, and then Steve released, hot and wet into Tony’s mouth. He only swallowed a bit of it, instead he held it in his mouth. Once Steve settled, his whole body quaking like a live wire beneath him, Tony crawled Steve. Steve smiled at Tony.

“You were right, needed to relax,” Steve panted.

Tony didn’t respond, didn’t smile. He pressed his mouth to Steve’s and waited for him to allow Tony entrance. Steve opened, welcomingly and willingly, and then Tony release the flood of come into his mouth. Hot, bitter, it slid from Tony’s mouth down into Steve’s throat. He gurgled a bit, choked and tried to spit it out, but Tony backed away and grabbed Steve’s chin, holding his mouth closed. 

“Swallow it, baby, swallow. Be good and swallow.” Steve tried to free his chin, but the angle of Tony’s body over him forced him to remain still or jeopardize his injured leg. Tony petted the side of Steve’s face. “Come on now, swallow it down.” With tears in his eyes, Steve swallowed, not once but twice, and then Tony freed him. “That’s good, my darling, that’s very good.”

“Wh-what?” Steve said, trying to sit up. He spat a little. Tony placed a hand on his chest. “Why?” 

Underneath his hand, Tony felt the tremors tormenting Steve. “No need to be scared, my darling. I’m right here.” Tony kissed Steve again, though he didn’t respond. “Let me get you something to help you sleep.”

Steve shoved Tony away from him. He fumbled but then summoned the strength to get out of the bed. He balanced using the side table and the chair next to the bed. He pushed his spent cock back into his pants. “What the hell were you thinking?” Steve yelled at him. “I told you what she did to me. What I remembered from those years and then you do that?” He shook, and Tony realized he wasn’t trembling with fear but with rage. Unbridled rage. “Get the hell away from me.” 

“No. No, no.” Tony slid off the bed. The sticky mess stained his pants, but he ignored it. “I wanted you to see. To replace that memory. You have to understand. It’s good. It’s all good.”

“No, Tony. It’s not,” Steve said. The flush of anger, the way his eyes turned to stone froze Tony.

“Please, I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry. I just wanted to have you think of me,” Tony said and tried to reach for Steve.

Steve pulled away, enough so that Tony couldn’t touch him without taking a step. “No. I think I’d like to be alone now.” 

It would be up to Tony to leave Steve, since he couldn’t possibly manage with his leg still injured. Tony acquiesced. “Okay, I get it. You need time to process. I get it. But remember, I’m here for you. No one else has been. I’ve been trying to do for you what they tried to hide. You think that Natasha, Clint, Fury, all of them didn’t know that you weren’t frozen? That you were tortured for decades by her? You can’t trust them. But you can trust me.”

He stalked out of the bedroom, closing the door behind him. “JARVIS, lock the bedroom door and don’t open it for anyone but me. Monitor Steve at all times.”

“Sir?”

“Just do it. He needs care and I intend to give it to him.” Tony knew this wasn’t what Steve expected, but it was what he needed right now. If Steve was to process what happened to him, instead of pretending it never did, then he had to do it with the knowledge that he could overcome it. Seventy years of torment is not easy to get out in minutes. Steve might still see it as some horrific dream and walk around in a fugue, but the fact remained at some point the truth would hit him and it would break him. He needed to fortify his defenses, and Tony was the only person strong enough and with the courage to find an avenue for Steve to grapple with the demons. 

“Talking it out would never work,” Tony said. 

“Sir,” JARVIS said as Tony went to the elevator.

“Yes?”

“Captain Rogers has fallen and is trying to get back to the bed after using the bathroom. Should I call the nurse?” 

“No. In fact, give the nurse the rest of the day off and tell the night nurse not to come,” Tony said as he put his hands in his pockets. He needed to clean up, so he headed to his workshop where he went to the small bath, took a quick shower, and changed into jeans and a t-shirt. 

“Sir,” JARVIS said as Tony finished up. “Captain Rogers has been able to get back to the bed, but he’s in considerable pain.”

“Okay,” Tony said. “I’m not an unfeeling jerk. I have a plan.” He didn’t know if he said it to convince his AI or if he needed his own justification. He went to the medical floor. No one was there since the staff were probably all on the research floors of the Tower. Going to the medical refrigerator, Tony retrieved the sedative they’d used on Steve and pocketed it. He grabbed a handful of syringes.

As he entered the penthouse floor, he nearly bumped into Pepper. “Oh, Pepper, what’s up?”

“JARVIS asked me to stop by. He said that you needed help with Steve?” Pepper said. 

Tony huffed. “No. JARVIS is being a mother hen. Steve is in some pain, so I was going to make him tea.”

“On the elevator?” Pepper asked and then she turned to stare down the hallway to the bedroom. “Do you want me to make the tea?” 

“Hmm, yeah, sure.” Tony thumbed it behind him as he passed her and walked toward the hallway. “I went to see if Bruce had any of that special tea, but I couldn’t find him. Maybe you could just make regular tea? I’ll go check on Steve.”

Pepper hesitated for a moment, but then as Tony raised his eyebrows at her, she nodded and flinched a little. “Okay, yeah. Tea.”

Tony hustled down the hallway as she turned and went to the kitchen. The door opened on his command – there were certain protocols that JARVIS couldn’t refuse. When Tony entered the bedroom, the scent of musk still hung in the air and he frowned. Steve had collapsed on the bed, his body still jerking from the exertion of his escapade. 

“JARVIS said you were moving around. That’s not following doctor’s orders.”

“Doctor said I needed to do physical therapy, Tony. He wanted me to use the crutches that you took away,” Steve said and rolled onto his uninjured side. “Just give me the damned crutches.”

“Be a good soldier and lie back down,” Tony said. “Pepper’s making you some tea. You need some rest. I’ll clean up in here.” Tony opened his hands in a consolatory offering. “Come on. I made a mistake. Ask Pepper. I never know how to handle emotional issues.”

Steve plopped back down on the bed. Sweat shined on his forehead and temples. He gazed at the ceiling. “I’m trying not to think about those years, you know. It took all my strength to deal with those memories when I just thought they were nightmares, but now, now I know they were real. You have to know, Tony. I can’t get that close to them.”

Tony crossed the distance between them and sat down on the bed. He caressed a hand down Steve’s cheek, and then rested it at the juncture between throat and shoulder. “I just wanted to help. I’m an idiot. Forgive me? Please?”

Steve shifted his gaze and met Tony’s. He smiled. “I guess I can do that.”

“Oh! I got you something,” Tony said. He stood up, turned his back to Steve, and pulled the medicine out of his pocket along with one of the syringes. 

“What?” Steve said and started to sit up. 

Tony didn’t bother measuring, he knew that Steve needed large doses to stay under for any amount of time. “Just something to help out a little.” Tony showed Steve the syringe. “It will help.”

Steve furrowed his brows. “No, I don’t think I need that at all.”

“Right now you do. Do you think I could have gotten this without the doctor’s orders?”

“Captain Rogers,” JARVIS began.

“JARVIS, protocol Z-1.” Tony rolled his eyes. “JARVIS has been having some glitches lately and I haven’t been able to deal with it because of more important things like you. So, are you going to take your medicine?”

“I don’t know. You said Pepper was bringing tea?” Steve said and took his eyes off Tony for a moment.

Without pause, Tony leaned forward and plunged the needle into Steve’s throat. 

“Hey!” Steve yelped. “What the hell? Tony! What is going on?” He swayed and then dropped over, his eyes twitching and his body convulsing until finally going still. Tony stared at the syringe in his shaking hand. 

“Christ. Jesus Christ.” What did he just do? Why the fuck did he just do it?

_‘You care for him, my darling, as I do.’_

Tony closed and opened his eyes several times, trying to clear away the fog, trying to make the voice – her voice – go away. He heard a clatter in the hallway and jerked to attention.

“Tony?” 

Tossing the hypodermic into the nightstand drawer, Tony straightened up and answered, “Yes?”

Pepper opened the door and stuck her head in the room. “JARVIS isn’t answering. The tea is ready, and I wanted to know if you want me to bring it-.” She noticed Steve. “Is he all right?”

“What? Oh, Steve? Yeah, he just dropped over. So tired and all. The doctors are really putting him through his paces. Too fast, I think. But you know, Steve, always standing up, always trying his best.” Tony wiped his hands down his jeans. “So no tea then.”

Pepper tilted her head and studied him. “Are you sure everything is okay, Tony?”

“Yeah, he’s just really tired?”

“Are you asking or stating?” She started to move into the room, but Tony rushed over to her, pushed past her and pulled the door closed.

“Think it might be a good idea to just let him rest.” Tony rubbed his hands together. “Could you go tell the physical therapist that Steve won’t be able to see him today?”

“Hmm, yeah? Sure?” Pepper said as he put a hand to the small of her back to usher her out of the apartment.

“Thanks,” Tony said and then ordered. “JARVIS, elevator?” The elevator opened, and Tony gestured for Pepper to board it. “Thanks, Pep.”

“No problem,” Pepper responded but her expression betrayed her. 

The doors closed. Tony stood there staring at the sleek chrome, the mirrored surface that distorted his image. He looked bloated and elongated at the same time. He looked down at his hands, his body, and he saw a stranger. He turned to the hallway, to the bedroom, his bedroom. No, their bedroom. Where he’d left Steve. After he drugged him.

“Jesus fucking Christ.” His hands shook. He wanted to run, to escape, but he forced himself one step at a time to go to the bedroom. As he clasped the door handle, his heart knotted in his chest. It tightened. What the hell had he done? Why had he done it?

_‘You did the right thing, my darling.’_

“Shit, no. No, I didn’t.” Tony ran a hand through his hair. Like a ghost, he felt a whisper of a touch across his shoulders. He jerked at it.

_‘Bring him to me. He needs me as you do.’_

Tony shook his head. No. He didn’t need that monster. He didn’t, but then the tentacle touch dissipated, and a chill ran up his spine. Abandonment. Loneliness. His lungs rebelled, refusing to take in air. He pushed the feelings away and marched into the bedroom, intending to help Steve. Tony breathed. It was one thing to have nightmares but another thing entirely when it haunted his waking hours. He needed to stop this madness that had so suddenly taken over him. He’d been hallucinating the creature. The stress, the fear of losing Steve, everything compounded to cause the craziness. 

Laying eyes on Steve collapsed on the bed heightened the horror. Tony nearly left, nearly ran away from what he’d done. But he stood firmly in place. 

_‘Are you so sure, my darling? Come to me and be free.’_

He pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes. No. No. _No._ He god damned will not listen to any fucking fake voices in his head. He’d gotten through Afghanistan. Hell, he almost died in space a few months ago. A dead creature wasn’t going to plague him at all. Resilience. He had it in spades. He made it out of Afghanistan, so they would make it out of this nightmare. Yet, seeing Steve on the bed brought back the sin. 

“God, what have I done?” He went over to Steve and checked his pulse. Strong, steady. For all the world, Steve only looked like he was sleeping. Maybe it had been a good idea. Steve needed time to recover. What happened to him? All these years and the whole damned world expected him to get up, to keep fighting, to never surrender. What the hell? The traumatic events over decades would, justifiably, send anyone else into a psychological break down. They asked too much, the whole world did. What Tony did was a blessing, a service to Steve. 

_‘You saved him. As I did, my darling.’_ The voice soothed.

“Yes.” Tony said and reached over to pet Steve’s hair. “You’ll be okay now. I got you.” He felt the vial of the sedative in his pocket and patted it. “I’ll take care of you. I promise. No one’s going to hurt you ever again.” 

With a little finagling he got Steve onto his lap as he sat on the bed. Tony had piled the pillows up against the headboard and reclined against them. He slowly stroked Steve’s face. “You’re going to be fine. I’ll take care of you.” The idea of leaving Steve, of letting others require that he heal and recover so quickly, turned Tony’s stomach. No. He wasn’t going to let that happen. Ever. He knew how it felt, how it all felt. He’d gone through palladium poisoning with the weight of the world on his shoulders. No. That wasn’t going to happen to Steve. 

As he relaxed he found his way to sleep again. He needed a peaceful, restful sleep. When he opened his eyes, she was there. The monster. Yet, he didn’t see her as the monster anymore. He didn’t see her as a creature.

But as a friend.

_‘I’m only trying to help him. I never intended to hurt him, my darling dear. I fed him. I loved him. He became mine. Like he is yours.’_

_The tentacles slid over Tony’s body, slipping across his naked flesh. He shivered in anticipation because he welcomed her touch, her invasion. He would give anything to save Steve. He would do anything to ensure Steve’s welfare. He’d already lost so much in his life._

_’My darling dear, will you give me what I desire the most?’_

_The word ricocheted in his head, rebounding and blasting like eternal Jericho missiles and they just kept exploding._

_Desire._

_Everything, if she would only protect him. The tentacles crawled upward and then the proboscis teased at his lips and he opened, willingly. It probed his mouth, touching his tongue, almost sensuously and he groaned against its invasion. It pushed at his tongue and his eyes lidded. Its other appendages cradled him, coy and teasing at his ass, at his cock. He sank into a lulled fugue. The proboscis entered his throat and it released its ink, burning and blinding. It choked and stung even as the tentacles pushed into his ass and toyed with him. It tightened around his cock as he wanted to struggle to wakefulness. It stroked him as it thrust into him. He wanted to come, he longed to allow her anything she wanted as the poisonous ink filled him._

He gagged and writhed, finally coming to his senses. What was happening? Where was he? Was he back in the ice cave? He thrashed at the arms, at the mouthpiece force feeding him. He arched away from it and then sat up, screaming, only to find his own bedroom around him and Steve coming awake on his lap. 

“Tony?”

He couldn’t answer. He coughed and choked, stumbling off the bed. He fell to his knees, vomiting up only bile. 

“Tony? What happened?” 

Tony spat up again, and then collapsed down on his ass, only to search his body for signs of that creature. The creature. He looked up at Steve. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” The words were barely audible as he scratched them out. “I just want you to be safe.”

Steve pulled his leg over to the side of the bed and then slowly eased down to the floor. He gathered Tony into his arms and held him. “What’s happening, Tony? You have to tell me. What’s going on?” 

Tony squeezed his eyes closed as he clung to Steve. How could he tell Steve that he had nightmares of that thing only after being in its presence for less than an hour? How weak was he? Steve had endured it for decades. What did that say about Steve’s resilience? His strength and power? 

_‘Because of me, my darling dear. I saved him. I can protect him.’_

Tony quaked at the sound in his head. “I did something wrong. I shouldn’t have done it to you. I’m sorry. I am.” He gripped Steve’s shoulders. “I don’t want you to think that’s me.”

Steve nodded. “Maybe, maybe we should both see the therapist?”

_‘Away. Away.’_

Tony wiped at his face and then said, “Maybe we should get away for a while. I have an island. We can sit by the ocean, lounge. Just forget everything?”

“Away? Do you think that’s a good idea?” Doubt marred his features. 

Doubt or was it fear? Fear and resentment? “I’m trying to do what’s right for you. I want you safe. Don’t you get it?” Tony got up, his legs still shaky.

“I do. I do get it.” Steve couldn’t get up from his position on the floor, not without considerable effort or help from someone else. “I get that you are trying to tell me that the creature helped me all those years. And maybe from some distorted view it can be thought of that way. But farmers feed animals and care for them just to eat them, Tony. It amounts to the same thing. She fed me and kept me to take the serum. She loved the serum!”

“How can you be so sure?” Tony said. “You didn’t even remember anything until SHIELD finally told you. It could be lies from them.”

“How can you say she was good?” Steve grabbed the edge of the nightstand and hoisted himself up, enough to get onto the bed so he wasn’t on the floor with Tony standing over him. “How? She tortured me. That’s what the nightmares were about. That’s why.”

“And why are you not having more nightmares now?” Tony asked. “Hmm? Shouldn’t you be having these nightmares? Shouldn’t you be a mess on the floor? It was seventy years of torment. Shouldn’t you be sick and distressed other than just your leg? You literally were captured by her again. How can you tell me that its her you have to fear?”

“I’m not,” Steve said. “I’m not following you, Tony. You’re not making any sense. The SHIELD doctors told me that the serum is helping me deal with this mentally.” 

“But why no nightmares?” Tony asked and waited for him to give a logical explanation. 

“I don’t know. Maybe since the truth is out, I don’t have to be haunted by it anymore. Tony, please. You’re not acting like yourself. What’s going on?”

Tony spun away from him, walked to the ensuite, and then back again. “I just want to help you. That’s all. I guess my take on things isn’t what you need. I’ll get someone to help you move down to your floor. If that’s what you want.” 

Steve cradled his face in his hands for a moment and then he looked up at Tony. “I don’t want to lose you. I know you’re trying your best.”

“All I’m trying to do is help you.” Tony said and then he went to his knees in front of Steve. “Please.”

“Okay,” Steve said and exhaled. “I get it. I do. But please don’t say she did things for my benefit again. I can’t hear that. The memories are so powerful. I can’t.”

Tony nodded. “Okay, okay. But what do you think about getting away?” He grasped Steve’s hands, vigorously rubbing and massaging them. “Just us. Together. We can forget about all this damned heroing shit.” 

Steve looked at his leg and then back up at Tony. “I’m not sure, Tony. I’m barely mobile. If I can do some physical therapy – a week of it – then I’m sure I would be up and around enough. Well, at least I will be hobbling.”

“No. Now, we need to go now,” Tony said. If he didn’t get to leave the confines of the city, he just might go insane. “I need to get out of here.” If he got out, perhaps his mind would settle. All the stress and hell of the past few weeks would wash away and he could rest. “I’ll bring the armor. If I need to help you up, no problem. Right? I can get a masseuse to come and massage the leg. It’ll be good. I promise. No more talking about that creature. Just us.”

“Tony,” Steve edged. “I don’t know. What you did… I don’t… I want to believe in people. It’s the one thing in this world I have faith in.” The doubt grew in Steve’s expression.

“Then have faith in me,” Tony said. “I did wrong. I know that now. I get it.” He clawed at Steve’s hands. “But you have to forgive me. You brought that on yourself, you know. You wouldn’t listen. Maybe it’s because of what you went through, but I’m only trying to help you. I did it for you.”

Steve frowned but accepted it. “I believe you, Tony. I just think you’re a little hot headed when it comes to making decisions and doing things.” 

“Hot headed?” Tony sprung to his feet. “Hot headed? Like when I carried a nuke on my back to save your ass? Or when I went to the tundra when everyone else told me you were already dead? Is that hot headed? Or is it laying down on the wire for the other guy? Laying down on the wire for you! Tell me, what is it, Steve!” Tony swallowed down the rest of his words, the anger threatening to boil over.

 _‘Does he even deserve your love, my darling?’_

Tony flinched at the inner voice but remained firm. “Well, Steve?”

Steve raised his hands. “I have faith in you, Tony. I do.” His shoulders slumped. “Okay, we do it your way. This time. But no more drugs without my say so. And let’s take it slow in the romance department.” He compulsively swallowed and part of Tony hated the idea that Steve might have some deep seeded fear of him, yet the louder, more prominent part realized how far he’d come. Steve finally felt compelled to follow Tony. “Let’s do this,” Steve said.

“Really?” Tony said, smiling. “Really, you’ll go? I can set it up so that the nurses and physical therapists come after the first week. But we can have just time for us. Okay? I just want to baby you .” Tony grabbed Steve by the shoulders. “I just want you to get everything you deserve.”

_‘And he deserves so much, my darling dear. Bring him to me.’_

“Just the two of us. No one else,” Tony said and shut down all other thoughts. “It will be just us.”

Steve agreed and that’s all that mattered to Tony. Of course, later when Bruce found out about it he brought the rest of the team in to attack Tony. He had been in the penthouse kitchen making some tea when Bruce, then Natasha, and then Clint appeared at the entrance. He half expected Thor to buzz down on the Bifrost. 

“What?”

“Steve said that you were taking him off to some tropical vacation,” Natasha said, her stance anything but inviting. Even though she wasn’t dressed in her SHIELD assassin wear, the jeans and oversized t-shirt still made her look intimidating somehow. It really was a talent.

“Yeah. You don’t think he deserves it?” Tony asked. He put the mugs on the counter and waited for them to show their true colors.

“What I see is a guy who drugged his boyfriend without his consent,” Clint said, his voice a low growl. 

“Yeah, Tony, since when do you drug Steve?” Bruce asked. A flash of green tinted his eyes.

“Did he tell you that?” Tony knew JARVIS couldn’t have reported it since he’d made sure to deactivate certain features through protocol adjustments. He had JARVIS on a tight rope since he initiated the Z protocol.

“Yes,” Bruce said. He flexed his hands but Natasha motioned for him to stay calm. “While we worked on some meditation this afternoon. He said you drugged him, but you did it for his best interest. What the hell does that mean?”

“Sounds strangely abusive to me,” Natasha said. “I don’t see Steve as naïve, but I do see him as particularly vulnerable right now. All those memories that he thought were just nightmares he finds out were real. And you’re drugging him and telling him it was for his own good.” She grimaced. “How is what you did not abusive?”

“Because he attacked me,” Tony said. It was so easy how the lie slipped out. Something inside, something terrible and bright squirmed with delight. “He had an episode. Another nightmare, like before, and he attacked me. I used the sedative to calm him down. I didn’t want to get the suit. It would have escalated, but, hey, next time I’ll just shoot him out the fucking window.”

Bruce eyed Natasha as if they had some hidden channel to exchange information. “I didn’t – he didn’t say that.” The green faded.

“Did he saw we fought?” Tony asked, and Bruce only nodded. “Well, that’s true. If you must know, we were intimate. Or should I say I gave him a fucking mind expansive blow job and then he got angry at me. We fought and I had to stop him.”

“But you said he had a nightmare?” Clint said, and he looked at Natasha.

“What, are you planning on having her kill me with her thighs? Yes, he had a nightmare, and then I gave him a blow job and it set him off. Do you get me, or do I have to paint you a god damned picture?” Tony slammed the cupboard door as he took out the jar with the tea bags. 

Natasha considered Tony and then both Bruce and Clint. Her arms were crossed, and she only raised her fingers to halt the conversation. “Say we believe you. Why would you take him away now? Especially when he tried to hurt you?”

“I didn’t say I was going unprepared. I will bring the armor. I’ll have JARVIS, and after the first week, we’re planning to get back to the therapy routine, both physical and mental. And when I say we, I mean we. We’re both going to do the therapy sessions.” He waited for them to judge him, because they always judged, didn’t they? Everybody and their brother was better than Tony fucking Stark.

“You think you can handle him if he attacks you again?” Bruce asked as he fiddled with his glasses in his hands.

“I’ll have the suit. I’ll have JARVIS. All is good.”

“You’ll shoot him?” Natasha scowled. 

“No, I won’t shoot him. I’ll control him. I’m prepared this time. It won’t get out of control again,” Tony said. “And if you need it so much, I’ll make sure that JARVIS monitors and reports back to you.”

“JARVIS is acting weird,” Clint said. Tony saw he hadn’t convinced the archer. 

“I’m running diagnostics for an upgrade. He’ll be a little glitchy here in the Tower for a while. The suit shouldn’t have a problem,” Tony responded and again, glared at them, waiting for their final resolution. “The monitoring will stream continuously unless we’re sleeping or intimate. It shouldn’t be affected by the upgrade diagnostics.”

Natasha narrowed an eye at him, but then said, “If you think you can do this, then whatever’s best for Steve. But don’t leave us in the dark anymore.”

He raised his hands. “I won’t. I won’t. But sometimes it is a private matter, you know.”

They all agreed and slowly exited. When they did, the tension in Tony’s shoulders lapsed and he leaned against the counter. He hadn’t intended on lying – to anyone. But this was important. He needed Steve to come with him. It would change everything. 

_‘You’ll save him, my darling.’_

Tony had to keep his mind on the goal, on the target. Keeping Steve safe, away from the madness of the world. Going away and resting would change things. Maybe Steve could relax. Maybe, just maybe, Tony could get the remnants of that creature out of his psyche and his head. 

By the time, they were ready to leave, Tony had run Steve ragged. They’d stayed up late discussing plans, picking out therapists to come to the island. During the day, Tony had Steve spend time interviewing the different therapists while Tony went to the lab to retrieve some supplies. He spent hours working on the monitoring upgrade. He fully intended to do what he said. At least, he would try, if it was necessary. Tony also had to be ready to handle Steve, if he had an outburst again. After talking to Bruce, Tony discovered that the sedative used to placate the Hulk had a derivative that Bruce had worked on and it came in an oral formula. Without pause, Tony went through Bruce’s notes and figured out the formula. Tony wasn’t a medicinal chemist, but he understood enough about organic chemistry and had labs and technicians up and down the Tower. He had one of the Stark groupies in the Tower synthesize the powder and he stashed it in his luggage. A little in his food on a daily basis would keep him quiet and compliant, if things went south. He knew he wouldn’t need it, but what if Steve attacked him again? 

Because that’s what had happened. Steve had attacked him, and Tony had to drug him as his only defense. Now with an oral form and an injectable, Tony was fairly certain they would be fine. Tony wouldn’t have to worry about anything. He packed the next morning with Steve trying to help but mostly getting in the way.

“You’re a whiney sick person,” Tony said as he tugged the stack of Bermuda shorts out of Steve’s hands. 

“You sit around for days on end with nothing to think about but the fact you were tortured for nearly seventy years and think about how you would act,” Steve said and used the crutches to get to the closet. Tony was folding the shorts and placing them into the suitcase. “Do you think we should bring this?” Steve stood there, holding the shield.

“The shield?” Tony said and then looked at the space over the bed. He’d seen it there the other day when he’d gotten Steve to relax after going hot and heavy with him. It was over the bed. “You take that down yourself?”

“What?” Steve said and then proceeded to ignore Tony’s question. “I’d like to take it. Just in case.”

“That you need something as a sled? We’re not going to the snow. We’re going to the tropics.” Tony went to the ensuite. “I think you need to leave the shield.” He didn’t want the shield. There was no purpose. “It’s not like you can be Captain America now, not with your leg or your head.”

“My head?” Steve asked as he reverently laid the shield on the bed. “My head?”

“Yeah, you’re not yourself, Steve. You haven’t been since SHIELD came clean.” Tony left the shaving supplies in the bathroom and went to Steve’s side. He grabbed him by the shoulder. “It’s not like you need to be Captain America anymore. You might never be able to be Captain America again. You need to rest, to be taken care of, to be safe.”

“I am not forgetting the mission, Tony. This is a set back sure,” Steve said. “But I think the serum really helps psychologically. I feel displaced and disoriented, and I have to admit angry and lost sometimes, but the feelings seem vague, like they’re someone else’s.”

“That’s dissociation. Classic symptoms. You aren’t going to be out on missions for a long time. You need to accept that now. It’s not just the leg. It’s the whole package.” Tony squeezed his shoulder, trying to offer some support. “You’re going to fall apart at some point. You nearly did the other day, when I had to drug you. It doesn’t make a bit of sense that you’re holding together because you’re not. We both know that.” Tony wasn’t sure why he never pressed the point before, but right now, he needed Steve to comply.

Steve faltered and ended up sitting on the bed. “Did Fury say that?”

Tony only lifted a shoulder. “Nat as much as implied it. I’m sorry they didn’t tell you. They’re a bunch of asshats for that.”

“But they let me be Captain America before, sent me on missions. When they told me I was just frozen in ice all those years. They knew the truth, knew I was having nightmares and they brushed it off. It was fine. Before the creature got me a second time,” Steve said. “I don’t understand. I’m not even having nightmares anymore, am I?”

“Aren’t you?” Tony asked and left it for Steve to decide. Listen, SHIELD? They had it under control. Now the cat’s out of the bag.” He bent down and kissed Steve’s temple. “Let’s forget this. We go to the tropics, have a nice time, and then we figure it out when we get back. If we ever want to come back.”

“You’d leave it all?” Steve asked, his mouth slightly agape. 

“For you,” Tony said. “Someone has to take care of you, Steve. I’d sacrifice everything for you. You know that.”

Steve nodded, his motions looked stilted, almost numb as he accepted what Tony said. He ended up leaving the shield on the bed as Tony wheeled his chair into the bedroom. “Hop in. It’ll be easier than you limping all the way to the Quin Jet.”

Steve gave no argument and settled in the chair with the crutches on his lap. With one last look at the shield, Steve nodded and said to Tony, “I’m glad we’re doing this. Just you and me.”

Leave the shield behind. The last of who Steve had been for the world. 

“Yes. Just you and me,” Tony said and gripped the handles of the chair. 

_‘Come to me, my darling dear.’_

On the jet, Tony went through the pre-flight checks. He smiled as Steve buckled into the chair slightly behind the pilot. This would be worth it. Going away, taking care of Steve, making sure he was safe. That was what he wanted. That was all he wanted.

_‘Bring him to me. I will keep him. I will hold him. I will make him safe.’_

Tony’s hands trembled as he took hold of the controls. The engine whined. “Ready?” He tried to sound confident. To sound reassuring. 

“I’m good,” Steve said as he stared down the rear ramp. “I wanted to say goodbye to Natasha and Clint.”

“Don’t worry. We can call them,” Tony said as he closed up the ramp. He launched the Quin Jet into the air without much fanfare. The jet veered up into the clouds, above the city’s spires and temples to the gods of capitalism. Tony frowned. He might be one of those gods or one of the supplicants. He never was sure. Once he brought the jet to cruising altitude, he laid in the course and put on the autopilot. He unbuckled and clapped his hands. 

“Snack?” He stood up and went to the food storage. “Maybe some pudding?”

“I’m good,” Steve said and stared out of the cockpit windows. 

“It’s chocolate,” Tony said and pulled out a few of the cups. “Good stuff.”

Tony no longer had Steve’s attention. Instead, Steve had struggled to stand and braced against the side of the plane studying the sky outside the cockpit windows. He kept all weight off his injured leg. Steve glanced back at Tony and then to the windows again. 

“No,” Tony said and willed Steve to stop, but he didn’t – of course he didn’t. Steve studied; Steve was a tactician, a strategist. Something as simple as where the god damned sun was in the sky was child’s play for him. Tony knew he should have made this a night flight. At least it wouldn’t have been so blatantly obvious.

“Tony?” Steve faced him, a troubled look scarred his features. Part of Tony sank, bothered by the look of doubt and fear. “What’s going on?”

“Don’t know what you mean,” Tony said and offered the cup of pudding again. “Have the pudding, Steve.” He smiled and wiggled it in front of Steve’s face.

“No.”

He shoved the pudding forward at Steve. “Yes. Have the pudding and this doesn’t have to get nasty.”

“I don’t want the pudding,” Steve said and swung around to the window again. “Why is the sun on the wrong side of the plane.”

“Really, it is a jet; there is a difference, you know,” Tony snapped back. He tossed the pudding cup to the side; it smashed along the luggage leaving a brown smear.

Steve snarled at Tony. “I don’t care about the difference. I care about why the _jet_ is headed north instead of south.”

Tony admitted as he moved through the next seconds that he could have fashioned a lie, but by that point – well, there really was no reason to even hide his motivation. His actions were firmly grounded in keeping Steve safe, away from the world that wanted him only as their idol. How else could SHIELD explain the selfish way it acted. 

“I think you should sit down before you hurt yourself,” Tony said and pulled out his phone. One day he might have a more automatic way to access the armor, but not today, not yet. He pressed the activate icon and the golden pod behind him opened, the gears whizzing and hissing as it did.

“Tony, whatever you’re doing, this isn’t you.” Steve put up one hand at him as if to ward off Tony’s actions. He never sat down; he stayed standing. “Stop.”

“This is me. This is in your best interest. I am trying to save you. From them, from everyone. I told you that she did you a favor. That you were better off. That she actually saved you,” Tony said, and the armor began to rise out of the suitcase, molding itself around him as it did. “Now sit down and eat the pudding.”

Steve glanced at the discarded cup. He winced as he stood his ground. “No.” Of course, Steve Rogers wouldn’t back down for his own god damned good.

“You don’t want to fight with me,” Tony said. “You’ll lose.”

“Will I?” Steve said and leaned down behind his seat to pull out his shield. 

What the fuck? He’d left it on the bed. Tony was sure. He only had his crutches with him when they left the Tower’s penthouse. How the hell did he manage to get the shield in the jet? It must have been Nat or Clint. Son of a bitch. He’d deal with them later, once he had Steve safe.

He focused on Steve as he said, “You’re going to fight me 30,000 feet in the air. You think you can survive that kind of fall?” The helmet sealed over his head, but the faceplate stayed open. “Just listen to me.”

“Listen to me!” Steve said. “This isn’t you. She got into your head. She has you, Tony. You have to understand me. Listen to me. Please!” His eyes were wild as he plead with Tony.

Tony marched over to Steve. Enough was enough. The heavy metal of the boots seemed to vibrate through the jet. “No, you listen to me. We’re going back. We’re going back to her and you’re going to be safe.”

Steve shook his head. His face drained of all color, his eyes pale and terrified – of him – of Tony. The man who loved him and was only trying to save him. Steve gripped his shield. “You’re insane. What did she do to you? What?”

“You think you can stop me?” Tony raised his hand, palm toward Steve. A threat – clear and present danger. He needed to teach Steve a lesson. “Darling, you have no idea what’s about to happen.”

“And you don’t know what I’m made of,” Steve said and tossed the crutches to the floor of the jet. 

“This would have been so much easier if you’d just eaten the damned pudding,” Tony said. Some logical voice in the back of his head warned Tony not to act, not to fire, but he damned it and committed. He shot twice, hitting the shield each time as Steve banked to block each one. “I’m doing what’s best for you. Put the shield down.”

“No, Tony, come back to me. This isn’t you.” Steve never went on the offensive. He remained in a defensive posture and that was what would doom him.

“It isn’t?” Tony shot again towards Steve’s upper chest and shoulders, getting into a rhythm that Steve would expect. He raised his other repulsor. “Do you really want to go down that road? Wasn’t it you who said I wouldn’t lay down on the wire? Wasn’t it you who said this was all about me, all the time? Maybe this is about me. Maybe I need to get her the fuck out of my head and the only way to do that is to sacrifice you.” He wasn’t lying now. He told the boldface truth that her voice was in his head, eating away at the last fibers of his sanityhad broken him. He wasn’t proud enough to not admit to that fact. “So, sit the fuck down and do what you’re made to do, Captain. Sacrifice. Sacrifice yourself for me.”

“There’s another way, Tony,” Steve said and his eyes implored with something akin to loss mixed with love. “Please, Tony.”

“What I know is that you would sacrifice for everyone else, but not for me. You won’t save me. You won’t do it. How could you love me if you won’t save me?” He fired in rapid succession, hitting the shield three times until he unexpectedly changed the angle and fired point blank at Steve’s weak leg. He hit the ankle, not the thigh but it was good enough to hobble him, to bring Steve down. He went to his knees, screaming out a sob, as the shield clattered to the floor of the fuselage. He panted and grabbed for his leg, then gritted his teeth and hissed a breath.

“Now,” Tony said. He pointed the repulsor right at Steve’s head. “Are we good?”

Steve groaned through the pain, rocking slightly to take his weight off his leg. Through clenched teeth, Steve begged, “Please, Tony.”

Some distant voice in Tony’s mind cried out for Steve, but there was no turning back from the course set by the devil that took root inside of him. “Well, there are two ways to skin a cat, you know.” He flicked the gauntlet to reveal the syringe. “Say goodnight, Steve.” He plunged the needle into Steve’s neck. Steve never moved to stop him.

“Tony, see me. All you need to do is see me,” Steve whispered as he collapsed to the floor. His eyes were still open, his lips slightly parted. In a whisper he promised, “All you need to do.” He reached over to the shield and placed his hand on it. “Please.”

Tony acknowledged that part of his brain screamed at him to stop, that Steve was his love, but then the louder part, the part where she lived, told him other things, potent things, things that made his heart stop beating and his throat close up. Trying to ignore it became torturous. It crept into his neurons, moved through his brain like snakes, and settled in his head – a vipers’ nest. Tony turned away from the rational and saw Steve as something else. Not a prize or a love, but an object that needed to be secured and protected.

He ignored the trembling of his hands, the sweat pouring down his back. Throughout the flight he checked on Steve, dosed him again and again any time he came too close to the surface. When he bent down to inject Steve, he would check his vitals and once, Steve rolled over and blinked his eyes as he came to consciousness. 

“Tony?” 

“Go to sleep, Steve.” He looked down the length of Steve’s leg – the ankle wound looked savage. Blood leaked out, and Tony glimpsed bone and muscle against the torn skin. He swallowed down the horror and the taste of bile. He should tend it, but the more the serum had to deal with the less likely Tony would have to fight Steve again. It would make this easier, he told himself. The weaker Steve stayed, the less Tony had to worry about keeping him quiet.

“Tony, you have to listen to me. Please.” Steve raised his hand. 

Tony released the syringe from the gauntlet. “No, I have to do what’s needed.”

“Tony. You’re being manipulated by her. Please.” The haggard look on Steve’s face reminded Tony of the days when they battled together for hours on end and finally fell into each other’s arms, spent, exhausted, and just happy to be alive and with one another. “Please, it’s me. Tony. See me.”

The small rebellious part of his brain sobbed silently to Steve, but Tony only thrust the needle into Steve’s bicep and said, “Shut up.”

When he stood, the more comforting part of his psyche spoke.

_‘Come to me, my darling dear. Let me take hold of you. Let me have you both.’_

“Both?” he asked out loud.

_‘Both, yes. Together. You will be together, and I will keep you safe. He will feed me and heal me and then you will be there. For me.’_

A chill crawled up his spine but the he felt her appendages like phantoms slide over his skin. He looked down and could only see the armor, nothing was there. She wasn’t there yet. But he felt her slip over his flesh, his naked body, and he moaned as her tentacles suckled at his sensitive spots, near his pulse points, teased his nipples. He felt as she caressed against the small of his back, as she slid further until she entered his ass. 

“God.”

_‘Forever. Be with me forever, my darling dear.’_

He nodded and agreed. It was so much easier this way. He didn’t have the weight of the world on his shoulders, and he could shed all his concerns. All he needed to do was get there, to get to his sanctuary. Steve would be safe. Tony would give his body for this security. Steve would feed her, and Tony would pleasure her. All for the safety of Steve. It was a sacrifice.

He jolted out of his momentary connection with her and smiled as he saw the white outline of the isolated island. As the Quin Jet approached the area where the cave had collapsed what seemed like eons ago, he scanned for geological formations to find a way back into the crevice. A small one existed. Not large enough to put the jet down in, but he could land and carry Steve as long as he was in the armor. He pulled the faceplate down, and JARVIS, still on a restricted protocol, mapped out the crevice and a way into the cave toward his destination.

“Good.” Tony thumped over to Steve who was still partially out of it because of all the drugs. He hoisted Steve up into his arms and carried him. When he commanded the ramp to open, he took one last look at the shield, laying cast aside on the floor. “Goodbye Captain America.”

Luckily, he’d set the jet down close enough to the crevice that he didn’t need to worry too much about the frigid winds and how cold it was. He managed to get down to the opening by slinging Steve over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He had to duck down and yank Steve into the opening, but it widened enough that he could stand upright. 

As he went forward, he spotted the tiny blossoms on the vines that quivered ever so slightly as if a breeze moved them. Instead of being just confined to the wall the vines formed a cavern, a tunnel through the ice toward her.

_‘Remove the armor, my darling, so I can feed you as well.’_

The dance of the vines before him lulled him and he dropped Steve without ceremony to the freezing ice floor and then removed the armor. The cold shivered across his exposed flesh, since he only wore jeans and a t-shirt. He glanced down at Steve wearing the same, who even now fought the last injected dose. Steve’s lips were pale, and his skin almost translucent the same as it had been when Tony found him in the cave all those weeks ago. Even now Steve struggled. He thrashed at the ground and tried to get to his feet, only to slip and fall due to his wounded leg. Tony swore he could smell the burnt flesh of his ankle. 

Steve reached for him. “Pl-please, Tony, look at me.”

Tony kept his eyes to the vines, to the odd lights shining from the little flowers. If he looked down now, he would surely lose his resolve. He knew what had to be done. He always knew. The world refused to listen to him. If he couldn’t put armor around the world to keep those he loved protected, then he would do this – a way to keep Steve safe and preserved forever. The creature - _she_ \- preserved Steve for nearly three quarters of a century. How long he would he survive if she kept him forever. He would last forever. Here tangled in her loving embrace, and Tony – Tony would give himself over for it. He always would. That what he offered the world and they ignored him, shunned him. So he would leave the world to its own demise and save what he could – save Steve. 

Through the haze of his musings, she spoke to him. _‘Bring him! I grow weak.’_

Tony stopped at the vehemence in the voice. He faltered and gazed down at Steve, grappling to hold onto him. Using the cave wall as leverage, Steve clambered to his feet. His whole body shuddering in the cold. The agony in his eyes leached out to Tony, bleeding his pain. “Tony, please. You need to listen to me. Listen to what I’m saying to you.”

_‘Bring him to me or he will die. Bring him now, my darling dear.’_

Down the long darkness of the cavern, Tony spotted the curve of a tentacle and his body went tight at the sight of it. His heart clenched in his chest and his throat closed. He rasped out a mangled, “Steve?”

“She’s not who you are, Tony.” Steve stood wobbly next to him. “If you would just look at me.”

 _‘Come now, or he will die!’_

The cave around them rattled and the lash of a tentacle slapped the wall. The whole of the blossoms spewed out thick venom. It hit Tony in the face, burning and stinging. He covered his face in his hands. “Gah!” 

“Tony!” Steve cried out and went to help him, but Tony pulled back his fist and punched Steve hard in the jaw, hard enough that his knuckles split open and blood stained Steve’s face. He then kicked out and hit Steve right in his injured leg, enough to cause him to topple to the vine covered floor. Steve rocked on the floor, moaning from the pain. The vines spewed more of their venom, hitting Steve’s eyes and mouth. He choked and coughed. “T-To-ny.”

“No.” Tony wiped at his face, gagged at the taste of the venom. Something sticky and burning oozed from Tony’s eyes, making it hard to see. He grasped Steve’s hand and then dragged him through the vines, down the icy cavern floor to the dark cave where he’d first met the creature. The collapse of the cave made the trek difficult; ice boulders blocked the way. He had to stop every few meters to figure out how to navigate around the ice. He wasn’t careful about it. Steve cried out as his leg banged against the sharp edges of the ice. A trail of blood streaked the ice in their wake.

As Tony entered the cave she greeted him. The tentacles skipped over his body, tantalizing and violating at the same time. The limbs slipped up Tony’s shirt hem, and down his jeans, easily snapping open the waist. It fondled him and he rocked into her, wanting her and succumbing to the feeling – the feeling of safety and isolation. As he moaned into her touch, another of her appendages reached out for Steve and then another and then a third. 

_‘So very delightful. My darling, my darling dear.’_ She caressed Tony’s cheek as she encompassed Steve in her tentacles. Steve fought and punched but his strength gave out due to the drug that was still in his system and the injuries he’d sustained. A tentacle wrapped around his injured leg and he screamed.

Through the fog of desire, Tony begged, “Don’t hurt him. You promised not to hurt him.” Tony pushed at his eyes, trying to clean them. He choked at the taste of the venom in his mouth. He must be mad. His brain pleaded him to stop, but her allure kept him like the glamour of a vampire. It didn’t matter what he thought, what he did, what he wanted. He was hers. He had submitted to her vileness in a pact to protect Steve.

She seemed to whisper in his mind. _‘I only do what is necessary.’_

The horrible crack resounded in the cave and then the tentacle wrapped around Steve’s injured leg released and Tony’s vision cleared enough that he could see the damage. The leg dangled as if it wasn’t even attached to Steve’s hip anymore, the only thing that kept it in place was his pant leg. Tony blanched, the taste of bile bubbling up and spilling over his lips. Tears streamed down his face as reality hit him.

“God, what did you do?” Tony screeched. “You’re supposed to protect him!”

The massive beak shot forward at Tony and the single eye blinked. _‘My darling. I will protect him. He will feed me for many years. And you will be my darling dear.’_

Several of her appendages surrounded him. He needed to call the suit, he needed to call for help. What the fuck had he been thinking? She had him; she had them both! He’d given Steve over to her! He needed JARVIS. He spun around as the tentacles wrapped around him, as the proboscis played with his lips. He saw it then, on the cave floor, where it shouldn’t be. At all.

The shield.

Steve’s shield.

What the hell? 

He’d left it on the bed. No, he’d left it on the jet. 

How the hell did it get there?

“Tony.” The word – his name – swirled around him like the mists of morning. The call insisted but blurred at the same time.

The appendages curved around his body. Part of his brain surrendered to the sensations, to the needs, the yearnings, the cravings of the carnal beast. His body relaxed into it, letting the beast explore his body, letting it into his body, allowing it to do what it pleased as his mind screeched and implored him to stop it, but he couldn’t. He was already lost, already defenseless and Steve – Steve whose leg had been amputated by the beast was probably dead already. 

“Tony.”

He couldn’t see Steve, not through the tangle of limbs and the looming beak of the beast. 

It was only a dream. Steve was too weak, in shock from what the creature had done to him. It was only a wish, a prayer to hear. “Tony, I love you. Always.”

He rasped out, “Love me?” 

“Yes, Tony, I love you,” Steve said. Clear and ringing like a bell. Not an ounce of pain in his voice. It was strong and confident. “Now, open your eyes and see me.”

If he opened his eyes he would see the horror of what she’d done to Steve. He would see how she strangled Steve; how she wrapped a tentacle around his throat until his tongue bloated and his eyes popped, until his face turned to the ice blue of the cave around them. If he opened his eyes he would have to admit his part in destroying his love. He shook his head and allowed this creature to ravage him, violate him. He deserved it. He’d brought Steve to this place. He thought he knew better, but all along she’d manipulated him. She’d used him as a conduit to get to Steve again. 

“Tony, open your eyes. Come on, open them.” 

He shivered, and the monster cooed at him. _‘Open them to see the ruin of him. My darling dear. You fool. You thought you would win. You thought you knew better. You’re damned to stay with me.’_

“Tony, listen to me. I love you. Come on. Come on! Open your damn eyes, soldier!”

Not a damned soldier! 

His eyes flashed open to see Steve hunched over him, not tangled in the web of her limbs. Steve’s face looked bruised, beaten, bloodied, but not wan or weak as it had been over the last weeks. He was strong, potent, even powerful as he beseeched Tony to see him. He knelt on both legs with Tony cradled in his arms. It made no sense. It was a dream. It had to be.

“Steve?”

“Oh, thank God,” Steve said and brought Tony to his chest, embracing him, rocking him as he wept. His arms wrapped around Tony’s head. Steve kissed the crown of his head. “Thank God, thank God.”

“I think that’s thank Thor, but you know, whatever,” Clint said, and Tony saw him over Steve’s shoulder. 

It made no sense at all. The cold seeped into Tony’s bones and he shivered in Steve’s arms. The cave was still around them, the frigid air chilled him. “Wh-wha?” 

Did the team follow them? How did Steve get free? How did Steve get into his uniform? How did his leg heal so quickly? As Tony glanced around the cave, he spotted it again. The shield. Yet this time it was stained with blood, marred with scratches, and around it – the wreckage of a tentacled creature. 

“Let’s get you onto the Quin Jet and safe,” Steve said as he lifted Tony up with two very strong healthy legs. 

Tony looked down at his own body and noticed that he wore a broken chest plate of the armor, and part of the legs of his armor over his insulated undersuit.. 

“What happened?” Tony said but he clung to Steve as they passed the bits and pieces of the creature. The vines were burnt and dead. “Where is she?”

“She?” Steve said. “I don’t think that Thor described the creature as female.”

“Creature? What?” Dizziness overcame him, and he warned. “I think I might be sick.”

Deftly, Steve tilted Tony, so he could vomit onto the cave floor. Once he was done, Steve adjusted Tony in his arms and carefully climbed to freedom outside of the cave. The Quin Jet waited on the edge of an iceberg in the middle of nowhere as the sun skirted the day time sky. The land looked hollow, ethereal, and distant. Like every memory, the land offered only its cold secrets.

Steve carried him into the jet as Clint and Natasha followed. Thor smiled to Tony as Steve laid him down on the bench in the back. Both Clint and Natasha went to the front of the Jet. Steve offered Tony a cup of water to clean his mouth. He drank it greedily even though it was cold. Thirst burned his throat. Bruce came over and started an intravenous line as Steve moved off to discuss something in quietly with Thor. 

“I don’t understand.” Tony waited for the creature’s voice in his head, but all that remained was the whispering cold. “What happened?”

Bruce looked to Steve but didn’t answer Tony. 

“For God’s sake, tell me what the fuck happened? Why is Steve walking? Why can you walk? Why isn’t anyone fucked up about that creature still being alive?” His arteries felt like they might burst. Something was wrong. This was wrong. She wasn’t there. His heart pounded in his chest against the arc reactor. He felt like his lungs might revolt and split out of his chest.

Steve came to Tony’s side and held his hand. “It’s okay, Tony. You don’t have to worry about it. Don’t you remember the mission?”

“Mission?”

It was Thor who answered. “You were captured by a creature from the Nine Realms. Sometimes it is called Jörmungandr. Others have named it the Kraken. It might have been a godless cross of the two. It escaped when the Bifrost shattered and infiltrated your world. We went to defeat it, but you were captured instead.”

“I’m sorry it took so long to find you, Tony,” Steve said. He curled his hands around Tony’s hand. His head bowed in shame. “Three days is too long.”

“Three days?” Tony said and sat up even though Bruce tried to push him down as the engines to the jet rumbled to life. Only three days? Steve hadn’t been its prisoner? He hadn’t had surgery? Tony hadn’t abused him? “Three fucking days.”

“It took a while. There was some kind of problem with JARVIS – some glitch we had to work out without you, plus the transponder in the armor didn’t respond,” Steve explained. “I’m so sorry. This is my fault. When the creature came for me you jumped in the way and shot it and then it managed to pull you under.” His earnest pained look sent shivers of fear through Tony.

“Under what?”

Steve glanced at his team members. “The surface of the water, Tony. We thought you’d drowned.”

“What?” Tony said and then he recognized the look, the pain in Steve’s features. It had been the same one Tony had felt when he was searching for Steve. In his dream? It was a dream? He could hardly believe it. The feel, the texture, the smell of it – all of it was too real. But then he saw Steve again and knew that expression. “You thought you were looking for a corpse.”

Steve blinked too many times, and it was Bruce who spoke. “Yes.”

“She came for you because she had you for seventy years,” Tony mumbled.

Steve smiled and laughed a bit. “What?” He shook his head. “No, Tony, she never had me,” he said. “She just got to Earth because of the Bifrost shattering like Thor said, nothing more. I was frozen for seventy years. You know that.”

“These creatures are known for their devilry,” Thor said. “It invades the mind, uses the host as a vehicle. It creates nightmares to feed off of and use.”

Tony rubbed at his temples. “Jesus.”

“Don’t worry about it, just rest,” Steve said and then Bruce and Thor moved away. Steve leaned down and kissed his temple. “I’m here now.”

“But I remember it all,” Tony said, and it had been weeks, months even. He remembered the touch, he remembered the sights, the cold, the enticement of her and the loss of his mind as he tried to sacrifice Steve. “God.” 

Steve clasped Tony’s hands and the realness shocked him. 

“You never had nightmares?” He didn’t need for Steve to answer, because his memories resolved and the fake ones, the nightmares, started to crumble and flake away. “No, you never did. Not like those anyway.” It made no sense. How could Steve had been captured and imprisoned by that thing for nearly seventy years and not gone mad? It bent Tony’s mind, warped it so much that right now he wasn’t sure he could tell reality from fantasy. “Shit.” How had he accepted such a tale? Did he want so much to be Steve’s savior that the thing used it against him?

Steve reached up and stroked Tony’s grizzled beard. “I’m so sorry it took as long as it did. I’m so sorry I gave up hope.”

Tony only shook his head, and then he scratched at his beard. Three days, but it felt more like three months. “You were hurt. Really hurt. You couldn’t even walk.”

“It was the venom. The creature probably dosed you with it. Thor said sometimes the serpent creature liked to use a venom that caused the victim to live in a fantasy world to keep them calm and placid as the creature fed off of you,” Steve said and blanched a little at the last of it. “I should have found you sooner. You could have died, wasted away.”

“Fed off of me?” Tony gagged and grabbed at this throat. “It didn’t do-.”

“Not that we can tell, but the doctors will tell us more. As far as Thor told us, it uses the venom to keep you calm and then it uses its suckers to leach off your energy.” Steve pointed to the i.v. line. “Bruce hooked you up to some lactose ringer solution. Just to get your energy and blood sugar up. Once we get back to the Tower, we’ll make sure you’re safe.”

“Safe.” That’s all Tony wanted, for Steve to be safe. “It knew. It knew about how much I cared for you. It used you as a weapon.” 

“If we found you alive, then Thor said that would be possible,” Steve said and brought Tony’s hand up to his lips. He kissed him. “Let me get you out of the rest of your armor.” 

Tony glanced down at the armor; it was mangled and twisted. The metal alloy torn as if it was only a tin can. He nodded to Steve. He really needed to process what had happened. What had been real? If anything at all. He had no memory of the mission – only flashes that could be from any generic mission. 

Slowly and tenderly, Steve began to peel off the armor. The leg, belt, and groin areas were easiest. When he got to the battered chest plate, Steve helped Tony to sit up again. He blacked out for a second, but Steve lent a hand to keep him steady.

“Okay?”

Tony swallowed down the bile. The sickness riling his stomach came from the thought of what Tony had done in his nightmares, not the sudden dizziness. “I thought you were hurt. All that time. I thought you were really hurt and then I-.” He recalled capitulating to the creature, allowing her in his brain, letting her to guide him on what he should do to Steve. He’d done so many wrong things. He’d drugged him, violated his trust, brought him back to the creature as a crazy sacrifice. The flood of nightmare memories washed over him, and he jerked at Steve’s touch. It didn’t matter his reasons or rational, he’d tried to offer Steve up as some kind of sacrifice to a monster.

“I don’t – I can’t even tell you what I did, what I did to you,” Tony said.

Steve put down the tools he gathered and looked Tony squarely in the face. “Whatever you did, it doesn’t matter at all. What the creature made you think or dream, that’s all it was Tony – a nightmare. Remember that. You’re here with me now. I love you. I trust you, Tony.”

During the dreams implanted in his head by the creature, Tony recalled saying he loved Steve, and Steve saying it to Tony. It had been something he’d wished for – for months. But he realized they’d never said it, not truly, not in real life. “You said it in my dreams, you know.”

“Did I?” Steve smiled softly. “I’m glad.”

“You never said it before,” Tony said and that smacked him right in the chest. Steve had never confessed his feelings to Tony, until today, until it mattered when he needed Tony to see him, to realize he was saved, to rescue Tony. “You said I love you to save me.”

“Yes, I did,” Steve said and looked down at the tools. “I did say it, for the first time.” He peered up at Tony, expectantly.

The piercing eyes, the slightly parted lips stole the breath from Tony and he gasped once before he said, “I love you, I love you so damned much. I never want to lose you.” He grappled and managed to fling himself into Steve’s arms. Steve embraced him, hard and true. The darkness of the world he’d live in melted away as if the jet itself passed through an envelope into a new reality. Saying _I love you_ does that he supposed. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Steve said and pulled away. Tears stained his cheeks. “I thought I lost you for good.”

“I’m right here. I’m safe.”

“I’m so glad you’re safe. I don’t know what I would do if you weren’t,” Steve said and kissed him. The kiss carried him away, shifting what had been his reality to the new one. The building blocks assembled. This new space where he loved and was loved. Where this great romance became the central core of him. He could never lose Steve.

But then the memories slammed into him. What he’d tried to do to Steve, how he very nearly lost everything in that fucked up world in his head. “I’m so ashamed of what I did in the-.”.”

“You don’t have to think about it. Whatever it was, it doesn’t matter,” Steve said. “You’re safe now. That’s all that matters.” He kissed Tony once more, lightly, softly as if Tony was the most precious person on the world. “Now let me get you out of this.”

“Safe,” Tony agreed and allowed Steve to use a pliers and wrench to get the rest of the armor off. “That’s what I wanted, you know. I wanted you to be safe. In those dreams, I wanted you to be safe.”

“And we’re both safe now,” Steve said as he finished. He laid the chest plate and back plate to the side. “We’re together. Safe.”

Steve stroked Tony’s hand, his cheek, his lips. “We’re safe. Together. Forever.” He kissed him and slid his tongue in. It sent chills of desire through Tony. It felt like it had been forever since he’d touched Steve, since Steve had touched him. He tried not to think of that thing, the monster’s touch.

“Safe,” Tony murmured.

“Yes. Safe.” Steve smiled. He gazed at Tony as if his whole world revolved around him, as if nothing else in the darkness or the light of the universe existed. He whispered in loving tones, “Together, my darling dear.” 

Tony jerked and stared at Steve. “What?”

The shadows ran over Steve’s face. The light in his crystalline eyes shuttered, but Steve only tilted his head and grinned. The air around them stilled and Tony heard nothing else but the words that had echoed in his brain. Yet, this time, the words were in Steve’s voice. 

_“My darling dear.”_

THE END.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed the story. If you did please consider leaving a kudo or a comment. I love to hear about it. If you want I'm on tumblr (winterstar95). Also, please give Narukyuu's [art](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14818685) some love as well! Go to that link to give love!! Thank you!!


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